


Three By Three

by diannelamerc



Series: The Mardi Gras Series [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Culture, Angst, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Season/Series 01, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-21
Updated: 2006-05-21
Packaged: 2017-10-09 18:26:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diannelamerc/pseuds/diannelamerc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our favorite trio have recuperated from their little island holiday. So, where to next?</p><p>(The light-hearted PWP fic series has suddenly developed a plot. A long plot. A long, angsty plot. You have been warned.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I should grovel here: So many people have said so very many nice things about this fic series, and I keep promising to post the next part. I wrote the bulk of it in November, for heaven's sake! But between holidays, life, betaing, avoidance, depression, and a million other excuses, I've only just got it finished and post-able now. I appreciate your patience, and worship my betas, [](http://christinenj.livejournal.com/profile)[**christinenj**](http://christinenj.livejournal.com/), [](http://lizbetann.livejournal.com/profile)[**lizbetann**](http://lizbetann.livejournal.com/), and [](http://wendymr.livejournal.com/profile)[**wendymr**](http://wendymr.livejournal.com/), for their help.

Nothing about Maxion 7's scattered trees, rolling fields, and generally bucolic setting suggested that their visit would be anything out of the ordinary. Of course, for the three of them 'ordinary' usually included at least one kidnapping, explosion, or threat of imminent planetary destruction. But stepping out onto an empty dirt road in what he'd guess was a fine spring morning for these parts, Captain Jack Harkness wasn't expecting even that much excitement.

"So, why are we here?" Rose asked before he could.

"Well, you did say we were out of milk," the Doctor responded with a big grin.

Rose stared at a cow standing across the road. The cow stared back at her placidly.

"What? And you're expecting me to carry it back in a bucket this time?" she asked, voice rising with every word.

Jack couldn't help joining in. "Can't get it any fresher, Rose!" he offered with a smile as she turned to him in utter disbelief.

As if on cue, the cow took that moment to lift its tail and drop a sizable steaming mess in the pasture grass.

"Ewwww!" she responded, her nose wrinkling as the odor hit. "I don't want it _that_ fresh!"

It never ceased to amaze Jack how someone raised in such an incredibly primitive time in Earth's history (in comparison to his own, anyway) could be so appalled at the simplicity of a lifestyle her own great-grandmother probably lived.

Then again, he wasn't exactly feeling all that thirsty at the moment either.

"But I don't know how to milk a cow!" Rose protested, starting to sound desperate.

"And I wasn't suggesting you steal from the first farmer you find," the Doctor countered, turning to her with a disapproving frown. "Really, Rose, I'm shocked." As she continued to look at him, speechless, he took an assessing glance down the road in both directions and then, arbitrarily as far as Jack could see, turned right and started walking. "There's sure to be a market around somewhere," he offered.

Rose looked back and forth between them. Jack knew his own poker face to be downright remarkable, so it must have been something in the Doctor's stride that gave them away.

"Oi, you!" She whacked him on the arm, and scurried after the Doctor, who, Jack noted ruefully, had had the good sense to be out of arm's reach. "You two are putting me on!" He couldn't help laughing at her indignation, and, catching her glare, wisely kept a strategic few steps behind for the moment.

"Well, that is where your milk comes from, Rose," the Doctor reminded her, trying to dodge the accusation.

"No," Rose insisted. "My milk comes from a plastic bottle in the supermarket and that's the way I like it." The defiant look on her face wasn't enough to stop either man's laughter. Naturally, she responded with a full-on pout so adorable Jack didn't even try to resist the urge to suddenly bend her back over one arm and kiss it away.

Her initial startled squawk turned quickly into a moan of appreciation as she enthusiastically returned the kiss, soft lips parting and hands sliding behind his neck.

"Oi, you two!" Jack broke the kiss long enough to see the Doctor standing in the road, hands on hips, attempting to look annoyed rather than turned on (something the form-fitting jeans he was wearing didn't exactly assist with). "Time for that later. We've got a planet to explore!"

Laughing, he stole another whisper-quick kiss from Rose before jogging a couple of strides to catch up with the Doctor. Sadly, it meant he missed the content — if not the intent — behind Rose's muttered retort.

She lost no time in catching up to them, though, and repeating her original question.

"What? We have to have a reason to go exploring now?" the Doctor answered, clearly attempting to dodge the issue again.

Jack grinned. He considered himself an equal-opportunity annoyance. "The Doctor said something about Assun silk...," he offered, countering the man's annoyed glance with a look of pure innocence.

"Like the flourosilk?" Rose asked.

"Maxion 7 is renowned for its fine fabrics of all kinds," Jack helpfully explained. "Right, Doctor?" Being roundly ignored just made his grin bigger.

Rose looked at a lone dusty farmer working his field off to their right, and the little, mostly thatched village they could now see up ahead. "These people make flourosilk?" she asked, looking at him like he'd lost his mind.

"Ah, well, that's the thing, Rose." He made a show of looking around and carefully judging their surroundings, then went with the guess he'd made as soon as they stepped outside. "I think we're a bit early for that."

"Early?"

"Like maybe two, three hundred years, at least?" he suggested, looking pointedly at the back of the Doctor's head. Rose's eyes widened.

After a long moment's silence they could hear a muttered "more like five" drifting back to them.

Rose giggled, and he could almost swear he saw color rising along the back of the Doctor's neck. Teasing him for stuff like this was much too easy — and a cheap shot, given the guy's usual track record. But when someone spent so much of the time being insufferably right about everything. Well, it just made jumping on a miscalculation like this one too much fun to pass up.

"Also," he added, not entirely sure of his facts but unable to resist, "shouldn't we be on the other continent?"

"We're on the right continent!" the Doctor insisted, turning to face them again. "Just on the wrong end of it," he admitted with a sigh.

Rose was back to giggling, and Jack couldn't control his own grin.

"I'd like to see you do better," the Doctor groused.

"Can I?" Jack enthused, knowing perfectly well the answer he'd get.

"No!" The Doctor took off again, headed for the village, obviously intent on making the most of exploring wherever and whenever they had landed.

Still, maybe someday, he thought, as he and Rose fell back into step. Given enough time, enough trust. Just the thought of getting the chance to pilot the TARDIS someday sent a thrill up his spine.

The village they were approaching extended a bit further than they'd originally been able to see, but even the addition of a large blocky stone building at its center didn't make it much more impressive. _Basic, agrarian society._ He found himself automatically assessing his surroundings. _No technology worth the name. Probably no interplanetary contact at all yet._

Still, it was a pretty enough place. Peaceful. Good place as any to stop for lunch, he figured.

~~~~~~~~~

As they reached the village itself, he saw his first Scanta — humanoid, but smaller than humans, with spindly limbs, short grayish fur, and the big eyes and ears that always made him think of a startled fox. He heard Rose gasp in surprise, and listened with genuine interest as the Doctor went into lecture mode, explaining to Rose how the planet had been unknowingly been colonized by two species at once over a thousand years before. Humans had set down at one end of the continent, and the dispossessed refugees of an entirely different species, the Scanta, at the other. It had taken well over a hundred years before the two groups had even encountered each other, but they had lived in relative harmony since, eventually becoming the famed center of intergalactic fabric trade the TARDIS had originally been aiming for.

That, however, Jack mused, was still some ways off as he noted the simple, drab, homespun worn in these parts. A few moments in the streets of the village also made it clear that the egalitarian peace between the two species that he remembered from the silk bazaars of their future was not yet evident either. Humans walked freely, while every Scanta had the cringing, wary air that marked them as a subservient segment of society.

"Maybe we should have changed our clothes," Rose suggested, clearly uncomfortable with the outright stares they were getting from the locals.

"Nah," the Doctor dismissed her concern with a wave of the hand. "In a place this small we'd stick out no matter what we were wearing. We're just foreign travelers passing through. They'll expect us to be strange and exotic." He flashed his manic grin at a Scanta child standing in the road, mouth hanging open in astonishment. That was enough to send the child running in terror.

"Yeah, exotic," Rose muttered, as the Doctor frowned in almost comical dismay. "That's us."

After only a few minutes in town, they managed to find one of the nameless, open-fronted, food-and-drink shops such places always had. Wooden benches, worn tables and unsteady chairs, a dirt floor. And the cheapest local alcohol available to anyone with the coin to pay for it.

Well, maybe not _anyone_. Once again the only Scanta in sight was one in a shabby, dingy-looking tunic being roundly abused in a near-constant stream of invective from the shop owner as _it?_ served the few human customers in the place.

Jack caught the Doctor's eye and agreed with the look in it: This was some kind of trouble, and the kind they just somehow were going to get involved in. Meanwhile, Rose had accepted her drink from the drudge with a smile and a word of thanks that had the poor Scanta frozen dead in its tracks.

Too fascinated by the creature's appearance to realize the reaction she was causing in it, she took the opportunity to introduce herself. "Hi! I'm Rose Tyler. What's your name?"

The poor thing's eyes went wide and it stood there for another few seconds, struck dumb in what could be either shock, terror, or a combination of both. Meanwhile, the shop's owner, whose distinctly unhealthy appearance was likely to give any customer second thoughts about patronizing the establishment, noticed the tableaux.

"Yo, scat! What do you think I keep you for? To stand staring at the customers like a brain-dead lump of Eisset turd?" A slightly more civil tone was used to address Rose. "Is he bothering you, Miss?"

"No!" Rose answered, finally realizing what she'd done. "I was just asking... him... something." Her words stalled. "About the town...." Rose may have picked up many things traveling with him and the Doctor, but the quick and easy lie wasn't one of them.

"The lady's had a bit too much to drink already today and was wondering where she could...?" Jack let his phrase trail off meaningfully.

"'Round back," the owner grunted. Then, before anyone had a chance to move, added, "Well? Show her, you little good-for-nothing scat!"

The direct order kicked some life back into the creature, who gestured for Rose to follow him. With a look back and a shrug at Jack, she did so.

"Nice save," the Doctor said, as he took another drink from his own cup. "What would we do without you around?" he added, a teasing look in his eye.

"Miss out on seeing the undoubtedly glorious local facilities?" Jack answered right back with a grin. He let the smile fall. "This isn't right. I don't remember the Scanta being treated like slaves in any of my history lessons."

"No, it's not," the Doctor agreed. "Granted, history lessons are always incomplete, and the disenfranchised are the first to fall through the cracks." He sighed. "But no, this" — and his look encompassed the whole society around them — "doesn't look like it's heading where it ought to be in five hundred years."

Jack grinned. "So we do something about it?"

"Not so fast," the Doctor cautioned. "A lot can change in a few hundred years and we don't know how bad things actually are." He swallowed the last of his drink with a wince at the bitterness. "But it could merit a check back at the TARDIS." After a few more minutes, he frowned. "Where's Rose?"

"Oh, you know, girls... bathrooms...," Jack shrugged it off, but he was starting to feel a bit uneasy himself. Rose did have a gift for finding trouble, so to have her out of sight in a place that still felt somehow _wrong_ wasn't sitting too well with him either.

He kept an eye on the back door, where Rose had disappeared with the Scanta, as a large and boisterous party came in and headed straight for the central table, shouting for food and drink. In fact, Jack was just about to get up and investigate himself, when Rose poked her head around the doorframe.

His relief turned sour in his stomach, however, when he saw the panicked look in her eyes. She laid a finger over her lips, and then gestured to them frantically. With a quick look at the Doctor, he got up and they both moved towards the back door as quickly as they could without attracting undue attention.

As they stepped out into the grungy, reeking, fly-infested alley behind the shop, Rose grabbed both of them by the arms and turned to run towards the Scanta, who was wildly gesticulating from several houses down. Both he and the Doctor let themselves be dragged along for about twenty feet before he heard the Doctor start to ask questions.

Just at that point the massive explosion right behind them made immediate answers superfluous. As the blast wave hit, he unconsciously tried to shield Rose. As did the Doctor, of course, the end result being that she probably ended up more bruised from both of them falling on top of her than she would have on her own.

After a quick check that no one had sustained anything more than scrapes and bruises, Jack looked back at the smoke pouring out of the remains of the sidewalk bar. His heart clenched a bit as he realized he could see the remains of the table where they'd been sitting through a gaping hole in the wall. _They could have been in there. Rose. The Doctor. Him. Any or all of them could be gone, would be gone if...._

He turned to Rose for an explanation, noting that the Scanta was long gone, and making a mental note to follow. By that point there was a sickening smell on the smoke drifting from the burning building that just confirmed that not everyone had made it out alive.

"He said," she choked, the Doctor's arm around her shoulders, but still shaking. "He said I was kind. I wasn't like them." She gestured helplessly back towards the ruined building. "He said it was dangerous, people would die, and we had to run." She choked down a sob, obviously trying to get control of herself. "But I couldn't leave you."

"Of course not," the Doctor murmured, squeezing her tighter. "And once again, the littlest ape saves us all!"

The attempt at humor was forced, given the situation, but it managed to get a tiny smile out of Rose. Jack was more concerned about getting out. He didn't know what was going on, but someone, somewhere was going to be pretty damned pissed off about this, and he'd learned it was never a wise idea to be a stranger in town when things started getting nasty.

"Come on," he said, pulling himself up with a wince. That hip was definitely going to have a nasty bruise on it. "We need to get out of here." He held a hand down to Rose, who looked up at him, thoroughly confused.

"But people might need help," she frowned. "We don't even know what happened."

Getting more than a little desperate to have all three of them out and safe back at the TARDIS as soon as possible, Jack took her hand and pulled her up anyway. He looked at the Doctor, but he was already getting to his feet, obviously reaching the same conclusions Jack was.

"Terrorist attack, Rose," the Doctor answered her, thankfully helping to move her along down a side alley at the same time. "Something's very wrong here, and we probably don't want to get involved in it." He looked meaningfully at Jack. "At least not until we know what's going on."

"What's wrong is the way people are treating those Scantas," Rose insisted, although thankfully she kept moving as she spoke. "Do you realize he would have been whipped just for talking to me if he was caught? He was a slave!"

He caught the Doctor's eye once again. It had to be good that at least one of them was still capable of surprised outrage at such a situation, but it always made him worry what showing Rose the darker edges of the universe would end up doing to her. Would she end up as jaded and accepting as they were someday soon?

The sound of the weapon being cocked right behind him caused Jack to freeze instinctively, before he even consciously recognized the noise. "Stop!" was growled from the same spot over his left shoulder. Jack made some quick calculations... that were shot all to hell when the rest of the group of seven armed men surrounded them, weapons drawn.

"You three are coming with us!"

~~~~~~~~~

Down on his knees in the dirt, hands tied painfully secure behind him, Jack had given up trying to figure out how they'd managed to get into this situation, and was desperately trying to plan a way to get them out of it.

The shop continued to smolder. Meanwhile he, Rose, the Doctor, and a round-up of probably every Scanta caught anywhere near the vicinity — twenty or so in all, including Rose's friend, if he wasn't mistaken — were being held at gunpoint across the street in orderly rows. They were surrounded by a group of twelve armed members of whatever military or police force they had in these parts, and their captain or commander or whatever — the same beefy, no-nonsense guy who'd caught them in the alley — was pacing back and forth in front of them, glaring.

"Which one of you little Scats did this?" he thundered. "Which ones of you are in this so-called freedom movement?"

To no one's surprise, least of all Jack's, there was no response from the assembled prisoners. A few Scanta sobbed quietly, but even those that looked truly terrified enough to turn in a close family member for their own release apparently knew better than to try to proclaim their innocence.

The Doctor, of course, showed no such sense.

"Hello," he offered in his most innocent voice, trying to get the attention of the lead guard. After a few moments of such attempts, the burly man actually paused in his pacing, directly in front of the Doctor. Jack winced, expecting to see the man's rifle butt connect with the Doctor's head at any moment — if they were lucky that's all that would happen — but the blow never came. In amazement Jack watched the commander stand there, actually listening to the Doctor's blithe chatter.

"Hello," the Doctor repeated. "Look, I know you've got quite a mess to clean up here, but we were just passing through your" — Jack watched as he seemed to search a moment for an adjective that wouldn't sound either ridiculous or insulting, and evidently gave up — "town here and don't have the slightest idea what's going on."

The commander's face remained impassive, so, naturally, the Doctor just kept talking. "Now, naturally, we're glad to have escaped this sad disaster, but we're really running late for a meeting elsewhere. So, if you could just untie us, we'll be out of your hair in no time at all."

Jack never expected it to work — and suspected the Doctor didn't either, he just simply couldn't sit still and await their fate — and he was unsurprised to see no change in the commander's expression.

"You were in the shop, yet you're the only _humans_ who survived. Witnesses, in fact, saw the three of you leave immediately before the explosion in the company of one of these _scats_." He spat randomly into the crowd of prisoners.

"Now why would a scat save three strange humans from a Movement attack?" The commander's look clearly said he thought the answer obvious (and disgusting), but he waited for a response nonetheless.

"I have no idea," the Doctor said, to Jack's relief evidently deciding any variant of 'because we're not assholes' would be impolitic. "As I said, we're just travelers passing through, and we'd like to just keep traveling. So thank you for your hospitality, but if it's all the same to you, we'll be off." Jack winced as the Doctor attempted to stand — rather gracefully given his hands were still tied tightly behind him — and the commander did hit him. He'd have a nice bruise for sure, but it didn't look hard enough to do more than drop him back to his knees.

This guy wasn't stupid — you can't get any information from the dead or unconscious — and that only worried Jack more.

The commander stepped back after that, completely ignoring Rose's choked noise of protest. _Don't draw attention to yourself, Rose. Just be quiet_. How they were supposed to blend in as the only humans — or humanoids, anyway — in a crowd of small, gangly, blue-gray fur and pointed faces was something he was still working on.

Even Jack had to admit: Assuming the standard, clearly drawn 'us' vs. 'them' scenario was at work here, the three of them looked like traitors to their species at best — and like hired guns at worst. From the expressions of utter disgust on the lesser guards' faces, it probably didn't make much of a difference in their eyes.

His heart sank as the commander scanned the three of them in turn, eyes lingering on Rose for a moment too long before he simply shook his head and gestured to his subordinates.

"Grab me five of them," he ordered. "And we'll make this one number six this time," he added, pointing his gun at Jack and motioning for him to rise. Caught between fear and relief — _not Rose, not the Doctor_ — Jack managed to stumble up, carefully calculating distances and angles—

—until he realized the bastard had turned the gun against Rose's temple with a smirk that said he knew exactly what Jack was thinking.

Watching the fear in her wide eyes, Jack tried to make his look as reassuring and confident as he could, while obediently getting to his feet and moving forward in response to a motion of the man's head.

"No—" she started to protest, only to have the drifting barrel swing right back to rest hard against her temple.

Jack tried not to visibly flinch at the sight and gave Rose a little reassuring smile. The look in her eyes made it clear she didn't believe him, but she was also clearly in no position to argue the point. The Doctor's pasted-on exuberance had quickly been replaced by that serious, inscrutable look Jack had come to recognize as his version of desperate thought.

He didn't have much time to notice these things, however, before he and five Scanta apparently picked at random from the crowd, were herded forward towards a large wooden contraption he had mentally filed away as some mill wheel or child's playground toy when he passed it earlier. _Should have known better_, he thought. But he'd been caught up in Rose and the Doctor, their banter, their presence, their life.

As they reached their goal, a dead weight settled into Jack's stomach. Upon closer observation, the large, flat, rotating platform was clearly designed to hold six occupants the size of a Scanta. One by one the Scanta with him, some openly weeping, some stoically resigned, were moved forward and strapped into a contraption that was looking more sinister by the minute. Then it was Jack's turn.

Two guards took him by the arms and moved him into the last remaining slot, forcing him to kneel facing outward at the edge of the wheel, his chest pressed hard against a low wooden bar. They had to bend his neck further than a Scanta's to get him properly situated — clearly this arrangement had never been designed for use on humans — but when they were done he was securely strapped to the rail ahead of him, his neck clamped in a rough collar that reminded him disturbingly of the business end of a guillotine.

"What is this?" The Doctor's voice was level and gave away nothing, but Jack knew him well enough to see the fear lurking in his eyes. _Well, damn. So much for a brilliant, last-second plan._

The commander shrugged, looking almost bored with the proceedings. "Since none of you will confess, we will make an example of these six. The Movement will know that its actions have consequences, and every Scanta here will know who is to blame for their deaths."

From where Jack was secured, he could still see them. The Doctor didn't blink; like Jack he wasn't surprised by the commander's answer. But one of the younger guards' guns now trained directly against her temple wasn't enough to keep Rose from going pale and uttering a choked "No!".

The commander addressed her this time. "_We_," and he gave that word definite emphasis, "use only the most humane methods of execution." His eyes rested on the still-smoking remains of the tavern for a moment. "A quick slice at the back of the neck, between the bones of the spine and—" He gestured, then snapped his fingers for emphasis. "It's all over. Practically painless."

While Jack certainly had no wish to die, what was breaking his heart was the expression of horror on Rose's face. Seeing her turn to the Doctor, obviously expecting some brilliant plan to save the day. Seeing the pain and helplessness in the Doctor's eyes as they moved between the gun at Rose' temple and the platform on which Jack was strapped.

He missed whatever signal the commander gave, because the lurch of the platform moving startled him so much he would have fallen over if he hadn't been so tightly restrained. He could hear soft weeping from the crowd, but could no longer see if the tears belonged to Rose, the Scanta, or both. A slight hissing noise behind him made his blood run cold. The sound of a blade through flesh was unmistakable.

First one down, then. Apparently there was just the one blade and the rest would have to wait their short turns. A rotating guillotine, some small back part of his mind noted, impressed with the efficiency of the design. But the bulk of his mind was screaming, crying out at the injustice of it. He'd been prepared to die seated next to a bomb leaving 20th-century London. He'd had a fun life, but no one would miss him. He remembered consoling himself by thinking that Rose might regret his loss, at least for a small time. But he had had no one to leave and nowhere to be. Plus he'd somehow managed to stumble into something of a hero's death. He had been able to accept that.

But now he had friends who were more like family. He had his love for Rose and the Doctor, and — incredibly — their love in return. He had found a level of happiness he had never realized could actually exist — at least not for him. And he wasn't ready to give that up. Not Rose's trust, not the Doctor's respect. And definitely not the piece of his heart and soul they had somehow found buried where he hadn't even known it existed. But they had found it and brought him to life in a way he'd never realized he wasn't before, and he was not ready to lose that, to lose them.

Especially not for such a stupid reason, for the sheer dumb luck of being in the wrong damned place at the wrong damned time. He couldn't even reassure himself that he was saving them, the two lives he did love more than his own. He'd seen the suspicion in the commander's face, and he knew damned well the Doctor and Rose wouldn't simply be set free to go on their way when he was dead.

The second slice had already been made, and he heard the hiss of the third. The muffled sobbing coming from the crowd seemed to be the only other sound. There was no rescue coming, no way to stop it. Not with them all tied up and a gun to Rose's head. The Doctor would never risk her for him, and Jack would never forgive him if he did. He just hoped, as he heard the fourth slice, that he would have a chance to catch their eyes, to see them for a moment before the blade took its turn on him.

As the fifth Scanta, the one directly next to him, was moved into place he slid his eyes sideways as far as he could to watch it happen. _*snick*_ The cut was clean and the blood minimal, he noted automatically as the platform began to rotate one last time. He'd have a second or two. Just enough time to say a good-bye there would never be enough time in the universe to say.

As the platform turned again, bringing him front and center, he focused on them and only on them. _I love you_, he shouted as clearly as he could with only his eyes, the contraption around his head too tight to leave him any hope of making coherent sounds. _You mean everything to me and I wouldn't have missed our time together for anything_. His mother had always said he had the most expressive eyes. Right now he did his utmost to make them convey everything he was feeling to the only two who mattered.

Rose's face was a mess of tears, and she was making no effort to hide her grief. It left him torn between the miracle that someone like her could feel so much for someone like him, and an unexpected wrenching in his heart at finding himself the source of this much pain for her. _I love you, and oh, Rose, I am so very, very sorry_.

But his mind had no words for the pain radiating off of the Doctor as their eyes met. His mind flashed quickly back to what he'd been taught: Legend had always held that the Time Lords were at least somewhat psychic. He'd never asked, never needed to, but for what it was worth he threw his mind as open as possible and projected everything he had towards the Doctor: _I love you. It was an honor, and a pleasure. Take care of her. Let her take care of you. It was worth every second and then some. See you in Hell someday—_

Then Jack felt the leading edge of the blade tickle for just a split second as it caught the edge of his neck.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Possible trigger warning in end note._

She saw the flash of the blade just before she heard the dull strike. The sight of Jack's head falling lifelessly forward, his body sagging limply against his bonds, a thin trail of blood marking the neat cut on the back of his neck, was something Rose would never forget if she lived forever.

"No!" She cried out again, futilely, once the deed was already done, her voice so choked by tears it could barely be heard at all. She couldn't tear her eyes away, until the platform began to rotate slowly, and she realized that the bodies were being left on display. Like all those history lessons about heads left on pikes outside the Tower of London. Making an example of them. It was then that she nearly gagged.

Turning her face to the Doctor, she saw the grief in his eyes, his gaze lingering on Jack's body for another moment before turning instinctively to her. It was the expression in the Time Lord's eyes that brought it all home to her like a physical blow, forcing all air from her lungs and all hope from her heart.

Jack was dead. There was no plan, no fix, no way out of the unendurable insanity of that simple fact. All that joy, that life, that exuberance and irrepressible enjoyment of pleasure — gone. Snuffed out. Removed from the universe. Cut from their lives and hearts by the stupid, arbitrary word of some bigoted little jumped-up magpie who obviously thought he had the situation well in hand.

_You have no idea_! she wanted to scream. _No clue what you have stolen from us, from the universe. And for nothing_! Instead she stayed there slumped on her knees, hands still tied tight behind her back, sobbing, as the captain of the guard shooed the grieving and dispirited Scanta away.

"Back to your homes! Back to your work!" he called out, and the Scanta disappeared into the shadows and corners of their society once more. Rose hadn't thought any further than Jack, lying there dead. But her body rose automatically as the young guard with the gun prodded and pulled her to her feet.

Her legs burned, all pins and needles as the blood rushed back into them, and she wobbled unsteadily as she turned to try to see the Doctor past her tears and the strands of hair that had fallen across her face. They had hauled him to his feet as well, and with the Scanta already long gone, it was becoming increasingly clear that the guards weren't done with her and the Doctor just yet.

"You two!" It took Rose a second to realize the captain was addressing his underlings and not them. "Take these traitors up to the main block." The captain spat once more at their feet, then turned away, apparently to assess the damage to the ruined tavern.

Numbly Rose let herself be guided along at the Doctor's side, through a narrow alleyway, and yet another. After a few turns she realized that she should have been paying attention. _How are you going to get back out, Rose, if you don't even know how you came in_?

It sounded like the Doctor's voice in her head, but she brushed it off. Too late now anyways, and back to what? Jack's lifeless body, turning endlessly on that sick parody of a child's roundabout? Ahead lay an industrial brick box of a building that screamed 'functional governmental architecture' in any place and time.

Down a slight ramp, through heavy reinforced and guarded doors — _So now you're taking notes_? came an amused voice in her head, one that sounded far too much like Jack's — right down a poorly lit hallway and into a cell that looked like every other she'd ever seen. The same solid, featureless brick on three sides, the front a row of iron bars with a hinged door set into it. A scrap of what might have been dirty blanket in one corner and a rucked-up pile of nasty-looking old straw in the other — it was frankly even odds which looked less appealing. There was an old empty bucket to one side, the smell coming from its rotting wood still making clear its function.

Rose found herself unceremoniously shoved inside, the Doctor right behind her. As soon as the door clanged shut and the guards walked off, she felt him digging around awkwardly in his pockets for the sonic screwdriver, and applying it to the bonds on her wrists. The heavy rope fell apart, and she quickly turned to free him.

For a moment they stood there, automatically rubbing the soreness out of their wrists and the stiffness out of their shoulders. Then suddenly, as though Time itself had dropped a stitch, they were wrapped around each other, holding on for dear life.

"Jack," she found herself mindlessly sobbing over and over again, unable to put her grief into any other words.

"I know," came the choked voice above her, and she could hear the tears he was burying against her shoulder. "I know, Rose. I know. I'm so sorry."

That last word threw her for a minute until she realized it was true, some part of her blamed the Doctor for not coming up with one of his insane, impossible, last-ditch plans. For not saving Jack. For not saving her from this ripping pain in her soul. That was what he did, dammit! He swooped in at the last minute, smug as you please, and pulled off the impossible — leaving the bad guys defeated and the good guys free to fight another day. And some part of her didn't want to forgive him for not being able to pull off one more miracle. Didn't want to have to accept that he was only — if not human — then mortal. Limited. Just as subject to the horrors of this existence as she and... as she and Jack were.

At the same time, a bigger part of her knew it wasn't his fault. Knew he would have done anything — save give up her life — to save Jack. Which made it, if anything, just as much her fault as his. "No, no." She turned, murmuring into his ear. "It's not your fault."

She pulled back, forcing him to meet her eyes. "It's the fault of those bloody stupid toy soldiers. All right?" Rose stood there, eyes locked with the Doctor until she could see him begin to let go of some of the guilt.

"Right," he said finally. "Now to get out of this place."

~~~~~~~~~

Sadly, doing so turned out to be more complicated than it had seemed. While the screwdriver would make quick work of the lock on the cell door, and probably even the massive doors at the end of the hall, there were simply too many guards around to manage a decent escape.

"What, are they all having their sodding poker night at our end of the cell block?" the Doctor exclaimed finally, letting himself slump down the wall of the cell in sheer frustration as another two guards ambled by, ignoring them but still too heavily armed to risk trying to fight their way past.

"I think that's the main guard station just across the hall," Rose pointed out, sliding down next to him on the ground.

"Well, that's just bloody perfect."

There hadn't been fewer than two guards wandering their corridor at any point since they'd been brought in. "Well, eventually some of them are going to go off and sleep, right?" Rose argued. "We just have to wait a while longer." The grumbling from beside her reminded her once again that the Doctor was not the type for patience and sitting still.

Rose wrapped an arm around his waist, under the jacket, and rested her head against his chest. She could feel him relax at that, drawing her close and dropping a kiss on the top of her head. "Oh, Rose," he sighed. "How did it all fall apart so fast?"

She flashed back to their arrival that morning and knew what he meant. The three of them had woken up in the same bed, a sated tangle of limbs just this morning. She remembered stopping to kiss Jack on the road on their way into this god-awful place, and the way the Doctor had rolled his eyes in exasperation and impatience, even as he smiled indulgently.

She would never kiss Jack again.

She would never hear his laugh, or roll her eyes at his outrageous flirting, or feel his arms warm and safe around her, or his skin sliding against hers in the dark. Jack was gone.

Rose realized she was sobbing wildly. The Doctor was rocking her, slowly, holding her tight, keeping her safe.

Just as Jack had done before. With a sick jolt she realized they were still not safe. And even if she and the Doctor made it back to the TARDIS unharmed, there would always be more risk, more danger.

She had reached up and pulled his mouth to hers in a fierce kiss before she even realized she had done it. _One day it could be him_, she realized as she clawed at his shirt, pulling him closer, needing to feel the solid thud of those two heartbeats against her skin. _The next time she could lose him too_. The fear pounded through her, alongside the grief and the need, and she was pulling him to the floor on top of her, desperate to re-make this connection with him.

The cell was unlit; the lights from the corridor only penetrated so far, and the guards had ignored them completely from the moment they'd been locked in. He slid her over a few feet, out of a stray shaft of light and into the deepest shadows where the wall met the floor, before giving in to the same need.

Rose kissed his lips, his face, his neck. Fiercely trying to make up in sheer intensity for the raw gaping wound left in their lovemaking. Not since they had started this wild adventure had Jack not been right there with them, an enthusiastic and loving presence. Rose didn't want soft and loving and kind right now, she wanted desperation, even pain. And it seemed that the Doctor was not going to argue.

He had already pulled her shirt up, scooping her breasts out of the top of her bra and fastening his mouth to one. The pulling suction was almost painful, especially as he matched the action with his fingers tweaking and pulling at her other nipple.

Digging down between them, Rose found the fastenings and unhooked the fly of his jeans, already feeling the familiar stiffness forming there. While the Doctor followed suit on her, she wrestled his pants down just far enough to free him, her hand rubbing him firmly as she felt him harden in her hand.

He'd managed to pull her jeans and knickers down to her knees and pushed a finger deep inside her, making her gasp and bite at his shoulder to muffle herself. He rubbed her sensitive bud hard — too hard — with his thumb, but the burning sensation only made her wetter, more desperate.

Before she could pull at him he was on top of her, and inside her with one hard thrust. Rose dug her teeth into his shoulder to keep from screaming, and rocked her hips up violently against his. His thrusting and their rhythm never slowed or faltered and it was over in moments, both of them collapsing against each other, exhausted, with tears still wet on their cheeks.

He tried to move off of her then, but she clung, refusing to let him go, holding him inside her for as long as she could. But eventually she felt him soften and slip out. She just turned onto her side, buried her face in his chest and cried, heedless of his efforts to pull their clothes up and back together before he wrapped his arms around her and she drifted off into an exhausted sleep.

~~~~~~~~~

The next thing she knew was a crash of light and noise as guards armed with flaming torches unlocked the cell door and stepped into the room. She and the Doctor scrambled to their feet, automatically adjusting their clothes, and stood side by side, backs against the wall of the cell.

One guard, the one with the keys, kept an eye on them there, but made no move to advance upon them. The others were busy fastening their torches to the wall, leaving plenty of illumination as they dragged in a giant wooden contraption Rose wasn't at all sure she wanted to understand. A free-standing, sturdy wood platform, propped up vertically and with a nasty-looking hook in each corner? A few lengths of rope swinging from one of the top hooks, and some stomach-turning stains and gouges marring the wooden surface? Whatever this was, it couldn't be good.

All that kept running through Rose's mind was the single word 'torture'. They were going to be tortured down here, and she honestly didn't know in that moment whether she was more afraid for the Doctor or for herself. Then the guards approached _en masse_ and pulled them apart.

Rose found herself being dragged over to the rack, or whatever it was they were setting up, while the Doctor was dragged out of the room. Rose wasn't struggling too hard, they were three armed burly guards against just her, and she didn't particularly want to anger them any more than necessary. The Doctor, on the other hand, was fighting so hard — calling her name, insisting they allow him to trade places — that one of the guards finally had to resort to knocking him unconscious with what looked to Rose like a particularly vicious blow to the back of the head.

That's when Rose started fighting in earnest, but to no avail. Her wrists and ankles were sturdily tied to the hooks on their little portable torture wall, but all she could see was the Doctor's limp form being dragged out carelessly between two of the guards. He looked as limp as Jack had the moment after his spine had been cut, and although Rose didn't believe the Doctor was dead — _Oh God, please don't let him be dead too_! — she felt the panic rising in her throat and she started to scream for him.

Her wrists already ached from supporting her weight when Rose finally turned her attention to her own plight. One particular guard, a big burly blond, approached her with a disgusting look of pleasure in his eyes.   
"So, what do we have here?" he asked in a loud, clearly rhetorical, manner that already had Rose's teeth on edge. "A traitor to her own people? A pretty little piece of Pyzatian shit?"

He spat, like the captain who arrested them had, only he hit her square in the chest. Rose didn't even know what a Pyzatian was, but at this point she thought it sounded a lot better than the seven creeps hanging around eyeing her up with distinctly unpleasant looks.

With one long step the big guard was suddenly in her face, hand gripped tight around her jaw. "Where are they, you little piece of gutter trash?" he demanded. "Where do they hide out?" He squeezed until Rose was sure she could feel bones in her jaw grinding, and pushed his mouth right up to her ear. His breath stank like a sewer and she nearly gagged. "And what," he whispered, "Are you and your little friends doing to help out such ungrateful, murdering scum?"

When she made no move to answer he stepped back as quickly as he had stepped forward. The sudden slap of his hand hard across her face was such a surprise she yelped, setting off an uproar of laughter among the surrounding guards.

"Why, boys! I don't think she's feeling very friendly towards us tonight," he bellowed, to more raucous laughter. "Maybe one of us needs to put her in a more receptive mood?"

Rose's stomach curdled. _No_! She almost cried out, feeling more hopeless and exposed than she ever had in her life. _Where was the Doctor_? _She was definitely ready for a rescue right about now. Was he still unconscious_? _Was he dead like Jack_? _Or was he simply no more able to save her this time than he had been to save Jack_?

She wanted to cry, to scream, to plead with them to spare her, but in her heart she knew it wouldn't do any good. She didn't have any of the answers they wanted to hear, and begging and crying only egged bullies on. She'd learned that the hard way once in the schoolyard, and she had no doubt it would hold just as true here. So she kept her mouth shut by force of will, trying not to think of these _monsters_ touching her, using her, overlaying her memories of Jack and the Doctor — whose presence she could almost still feel within her — with pain and humiliation.

But she couldn't stop her body shaking, as the men looked around each other, as if daring each other to make the first move. When all eyes fell to an older guard in the back of the group, his beard just beginning to show signs of gray, he shook his head and spat at her. "Not me, boys!" he announced. "I, for one, value my own assets too much to put them anywhere near some Scanta-screwing whore like her. No matter how pretty she is," he added, as though it were an afterthought.

Rose wanted automatically to protest, but managed to hold her tongue. Something for which she was grateful a few moments later as she noticed that some of the other guards were starting to look a little less sure of themselves. Muttered protests of "No!" and "You can't be _serious_!" could be heard from some of the others standing around her.

"What are you talking about, old man?" The big guard demanded, even though he couldn't be more than ten years younger than the apparent veteran in the back.

"I'm saying there ain't no price high enough, nor no whore desperate enough to screw a man who's followed after that Scanta scum." He snorted. "Watch, that's why they let us capture her, so you boys can have one round of fun with her before your dicks start rotting off you!"

Several of the soldiers shuffled a bit further away, but big, blond, and burly wasn't about to give up his prize so easily. "That's ridiculous, old man! _No_ woman would...," he gestured vaguely, the look of utter disgust on his face quite impressive.

"I'm telling you, boy, I've seen it happen!" Whether he was talking about the cross-species sex or the rotting results, Rose wasn't sure she wanted to know. "She's in league with the damned filthy creatures! Who even knows what someone that depraved might do?" He laughed without any humor. "All I know is _I_ ain't gonna risk my private bits over some quick jolt with a pretty pervert!"

At that even the big guard seemed to waver, and he turned back to Rose, sick curiosity painted all over his face. "Did you do that?" he asked, looking like he might throw up at the prospect. "Did you let some Scanta filth actually screw you?"

_I'd sooner them than you_! she couldn't help muttering in her head, as she desperately tried to figure out how to play this. 'Filthy whore' wasn't exactly the image of herself she wanted in these blokes' heads, but this actually looked like a possible escape from rape at least. The older man obviously had the younger ones nervous now.

But if this was how they treated a 'race traitor', she didn't want to know what they'd do to her when they thought her guilty of something so disgusting they could barely comprehend it. Would they kill her outright? Torture her in even worse ways reserved for someone they thought sub-human?

"I asked you a question, whore!" big, blond, and burly demanded, slapping her across the face and making her cry out involuntarily again in surprise. "Are you diseased Scanta-leavings or not?"

For a second she thought about playing coy, plastering on her most patently fake smile and claiming innocence. Only she decided she didn't trust this group to be bright enough to peg her for the secret Scanta dick-rotting weapon the older veteran had accused her of being. If the thought were so repulsive, surely they'd be forced to believe anyone who would admit to such a thing?

"Yes," she said simply. She could hear the veteran chuckling in the back as the younger guards all gaped at her in open-mouthed astonishment. Having chosen her tactic, she decided to make her new, contaminated status perfectly clear. "I was going to meet my Scanta lover when you captured us all. I watched my lover _die_ in that square!" The image of Jack's slumped body flashed in her mind and she had no trouble summoning up tears.

There was complete silence in the chamber, and all Rose could hear was her own heartbeat, hammering in her chest, as she waited to see what she'd just let herself in for. The first sound she noticed was retching; one of the younger guards was actually vomiting in the corner. The acrid smell wasn't going to help the ambiance any, but at least she felt fairly certain she'd forestalled the casual rape portion of her torture session.

For whatever that was worth.

"Well, we still need information from her," the big guard announced, from a position a few feet further away than he had been. "If she's been...," he looked too nauseated to finish the thought aloud, "Then she must know where they are, who they are."

"They've moved," she announced, surprising even herself. When all eyes turned to her again, she swallowed hard and nodded. "When something this big happens, they always move. Just so no one who is captured can tell you where they are."

It occurred to Rose then that the men should have kept at least some of the Scanta for 'questioning' as well, but they hadn't. Either they hadn't found an effective way of torturing the Scanta, or this was about finding humans apparently in league with them. She suspected they'd simply had no idea what to make of her, the Doctor, and Jack.

"Well, then what use are you to us?" big and blond demanded of her, after a pause.

Rose shook her head and shrugged as best she could in the increasingly painful position they'd hung her in. "I don't know anything," she agreed, and saw that they believed it. Which meant they had no use for her anymore.

Which either meant they would let her go, kill her outright, or....

"Hey," the big guard called, apparently to the veteran in the back, "Go tell Felp to bring some of his new guys down. They can at least get some practice in on her." She felt her heart sink. "Just warn them to keep their dicks in their pants."

~~~~~~~~~

Felp, apparently, was a master torturer, someone trained in the exquisite art of causing extreme pain without death. His casual, professional approach to the situation made her skin positively crawl. She couldn't decide whether the fact that the two new recruits standing beside him in the suddenly much emptier cell looked uncertain about the whole affair was a good or a bad thing.

"We'll start with the basics today," he announced in the voice of bored schoolteachers everywhere. "We've been warned she's not safe to touch, especially in certain delicate areas, but there's still plenty that can be learned from her."

Belying his own announcement, the master torturer grabbed her right forearm, turning it in the light with the impersonality of a doctor conducting an exam. "Her skin is fair, thinner than most. This is something that is important to take into account so as to keep from causing too severe an injury too quickly."

He reached for a small stick, which looked completely out of place amongst the terrifyingly sharp, shiny metal tools laid out on the small table in front of her. Handing it to Recruit Number One he gestured towards one of the torches on the wall. "We will start with the simple application of flame to the skin."

Rose didn't scream, not then, and she was, she thought, justly proud of that fact. Rose had burned herself on the stove before, even got a nasty sunburn once staying out at the shore too long. But this was different; this was deliberate, and inevitable.

As Recruit Number One stepped forward, and applied the flame to her arm, she screamed almost immediately. Bucking up clearly wasn't going to get her anywhere, and her nerves were already at breaking point from the events of the day. To her relief, Recruit Number One jumped back, startled, pulling the flame with him.

_Well, this one was going to do smashingly, she thought with as much of a sneer as she could manage. Yes, when you burn someone they're going to scream._

The instructor seemed to be having a similar reaction, rolling his eyes and sighing in disapproval at his student. Unfortunately, the look on Recruit Number Two's face as he took possession of the lighted stick suggested that he was determined not to make the same mistake.

Even knowing it was hopeless, Rose couldn't help but flinch away from the advancing flame as far as her bonds would allow — at the same time terrified that her hair, pulled loose and wild by now, would catch as well. She appreciated hearing the instructor warn his pupil about that particular danger. She was less delighted when he continued on to explain that, due to the speed at which human hair burns, such techniques had their own uses.

She really hoped she wasn't going to be around for that part of the lesson.

But, no matter how hard she pulled against the ropes tying her, how desperately she tried to twitch away from the heat, Recruit Number Two could reach her easily. The pain first caused her to jerk, then to scream again. Once she screamed, they seemed to stop, pause, regroup, and examine the burned skin like she was an experiment in a science lab.

That settled it: They wanted screams, they would get screams. She screamed when they came near her, and she screamed when they touched her. She screamed the instant she felt heat on her flesh and didn't let up until they'd moved away again.

The torturer was obviously used to dealing with more stoic types because he was scowling, only causing Recruit Number One and Recruit Number Two to become even more nervous. He debated calling for a gag for her, but apparently decided that that would defeat the entire point of the exercise. Instead he berated his recruits endlessly until Rose had a slightly hysterical moment of thinking that they were more scared than she was.

She had burns in three separate places along her inner arm now and they _hurt_. But she knew she was in for serious trouble when the master snatched the burning stick out of Recruit Number Two's hand and turned to demonstrate the proper technique himself.

Rose started screaming immediately. Her throat was hoarse, but she kept it up. Unfortunately it had no appreciable effect on the master. In fact he paused to sneer at her. "You can't let this woman fool you," he cautioned them, meeting her eye with a gaze so empty of emotion or sympathy it gave her her first true understanding of what it felt like to have your blood run cold. "She is much stronger than she looks. I will demonstrate."

_Oh shite, oh shite, oh shite_. She wanted to protest that she wasn't strong at all, she was very weak inside and would they please let her go now? Her mind kept racing in terror as the professor stepped forward, waited for Recruit Number One and Recruit Number Two to get into positions where they could see clearly, and sought out the proper spot on her arm, again, nothing so much like a nurse looking for a good injection site.

Rose didn't bother to scream in advance this time. That started when the pain hit. And kept going. And going. She could smell it, her own flesh burning, and she almost retched as much from that as from the pain. This burn was definitely bigger, deeper than the others, and the pain was so bad she started wondering if there was going to be anything of her left.

The last conscious thought she had was an image of flames licking her body, head to foot, engulfing and destroying her completely....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Warning for threatened rape in this chapter._


	3. Chapter 3

He'd thought listening to her scream, powerless to help, was the worst.

Then the screaming stopped.

He could only have been out for mere moments, but it was enough. Enough time to drag him away from Rose, around the corner and down the corridor to a new cell, no more than a hundred feet along. Enough time to somehow find and confiscate the sonic screwdriver this time. The jacket as well, with all its handy little pockets. Enough time to re-tie and gag him efficiently enough that he couldn't even call out to Rose to let her know he was here.

Although, in all honesty, he wasn't sure what he could possibly have said to help.

He could hear, not everything, but enough. The brutal laughter of the guards. Her sharp cries of pain. Then a long silence, in which he imagined hands over her mouth, holding her down, hurting her....

He hadn't felt this helpless, this lost, this sick with grief and horror since the day Gallifrey had burned.

Rose, innocent in so many ways.... It had all gone so terribly wrong, so terribly fast. How had he ended up dropping them all in a time and place he apparently couldn't get control of? These little apes still lived on farms and had barely managed to learn how to blow themselves up in the small scale. No electronics, nothing. Even by twenty-first century standards this place was a backwards backwater.

So why hadn't he been able to save them? Now Jack was dead and Rose was....

No, he was trying not to think about Rose right now. He was trying not to go mad with it. There still had to be some way to save her, if not from what she was going through now, then from whatever other horrors this deceptively bucolic little place had in store.

Somehow he was going to find a way to get her out of here. He refused utterly to think of what state she might be in at the time.

It was then that the screaming started.

Definitely Rose, a sound he never wanted to hear coming from that lovely throat, much less over and over. Suddenly the Doctor realized he was screaming too, helplessly, the sound muffled by the gag. The part of his mind that tried to detach, to keep him sane, tried to debate objectively whether it would be better to know exactly what was being done to her — even if it meant he had to watch it happen — than to be left to let his all too vivid imagination fill in the details for him. Not that he was being given the option either way.

Then came another scream, filled with less fear and far more pain. It kept on, and on until he thought he would go mad from it, and then stopped with a suddenness that made his soul sink. Before he realized it he was up on his feet, beating against the bars with his shoulders, kicking them, trying to get someone to let him out and go to her, to tell him what had happened. Something, anything but this impotent waiting and listening.

Eventually, battered in soul even more than in body, he collapsed again to the ground of his new cell.

And waited.

~~~~~~~~~

It was late in the night, or early in the morning, when he saw the furtive movement out of the corner of his eye. A Scanta, one he thought he might recognize from the crowd, but it was hard to tell... his attention had been elsewhere.

It took one look at him and quietly went to work on the lock. Clever little fingers, obviously trained to this task, had it open in moments. By the time it had slipped inside the Doctor was on his knees, turned to give the creature easy access to his bonds.

But the Scanta gestured desperately at him to get up, to move, to leave. Given the number of guards in the area, he couldn't blame it, and he didn't want to think what the punishment for a Scanta caught breaking prisoners out would be.

But he wasn't going to leave Rose. No matter what they'd done to her, he had to find her, do what he could to save her still. Stumbling to his feet he followed the Scanta out into the corridor, but it insisted on going the other way, away from the guard station and probably towards the nearest exit.

The Doctor dug in his heels and shook his head, refusing, gesturing over his shoulder towards where he'd last heard her. He barely restrained himself from taking off on his own, but — especially bound like this — he couldn't hope to get her out himself. He needed the Scanta's help, but it just kept trying to tug him in the opposite direction.

Finally, hearing footsteps along the hallway and seeing the increasingly frantic look on the Scanta's face, the Doctor shoved it back inside the cell with his knees, following and closing the door as carefully as he could behind them.

As soon as it realized it had no chance to run, the Scanta had retreated immediately to the furthest, darkest corner of his cell. Sitting down in front of it, the Doctor did his best to shield the creature from casual view, at the same time motioning for it to free him from his bonds.

The gag came off first.

"Rose," he choked out in a voice even quieter than he'd intended, made ragged by last night's screaming, by pain and fear and worry. The Scanta hissed, probably afraid that they'd be heard, but after a night of hearing Rose's screams ignored, the Doctor wasn't concerned for that.

"Rose," he managed to hiss right back. "The blonde woman, my friend." _My love, my lover, my heart and soul and all I have left in this world_. "We have to get her too."

The Scanta paused in working at the bonds on his wrists. "No," it hissed softly. "We leave now."

"I won't leave without her," the Doctor said, every word precise and determined, leaving no doubt that this was not open for negotiation. When the Scanta didn't respond, he forced himself to ask the question. "Do you know what they did to her?" He had to know the answer, and yet he was afraid knowing it might break him.

Still struggling with the wrist ties — the Doctor could see why the initial plan had been to work on them later — the Scanta sighed. "They weren't supposed to kill her."

For a moment the Doctor felt disconnected from this conversation, from reality itself. He asked automatically, without feeling, "Weren't supposed to?"

"She was tortured." He'd known that, had heard it all, his mind amplifying every scream, and filling in every silence with the most horrible images. "She knew nothing, so they decided to use her for training," the Scanta continued, a resigned sadness seemingly a permanent feature of its voice.

_Training_, his mind echoed blankly, refusing to process the further wealth of fury that thought brought boiling up inside him. "And?" he managed to choke out, as though from a great distance.

"And she wasn't as strong as they thought. They went too far and she died in the night." The ties finally fell away from his wrists. "There's nothing there; they've already taken her body out with the rest of the morning's trash."

The Scanta was only reporting what others had done. The Doctor forced himself to focus solely on that thought until the urge to break it's neck for even saying such a thing had passed. The thought of his beautiful Rose being carted away like so much garbage.... The Rose he could still smell on his own body, whose body he had buried himself within in grief only hours before.

And at the same time he knew he was focusing on that image to escape facing the larger reality: He had gotten her killed as well. Not even a quick execution like Jack, but a slow death by torture on some meaningless backwater planet.

He'd always known the risks they took; the chances of any of them dying a peaceful death of old age — especially Jack and Rose — were almost non-existent. But they had chosen to come with him, to live his life, to trade placid security for wild and dangerous adventure. To live every moment they had....

He'd had nightmares, pulled easily enough from their waking reality, of losing them on one of their grand adventures. Of cutting the timing just _too_ close for once and it all going up in flames. But even in his nightmares there had been reason for it, some purpose behind it — innocents to save, villains to stop.

Not this pointless, meaningless sheer bad luck at being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Time. He thought it for a moment — a split-second of hope as he imagined escaping to the TARDIS and taking it back to the morning, back to them happy and free on the road to this cursed place, teasing Rose about the milk and watching the two beings that meant more to him than anything kissing, laughing, _living_. He thought for just an instant of plucking them away then, going back to where they were happy and alive and it seemed nothing in the world could ever stop the three of them.

And then the instant was over, and he passively let the Scanta, who was furtively checking the empty corridors once more, lead him out of his cell and away down the corridor. He knew better than that. Of all creatures left in the universe, he knew better than any that it would never work. Not that he would mind loosing a few of those Reapers on this place at the moment. But it wouldn't end there. And he couldn't unleash that kind of destruction on the universe just to try to soothe his own pain.

Especially since it wouldn't work anyway. To bring them back long enough to see them consumed along with everything else in the devastation that followed? No.

He followed the Scanta along the hallway like an obedient pet, moving when it moved, stopping when it stopped, and following its every direction in silence, his mind barely sparing enough attention to his surroundings to do that.

Gone. It was an aching, hollow in his chest. An all too familiar pain that left him feeling empty.

He'd known it would happen, eventually. It always did. Such was the price of loving those with lives so short, so fragile.

But it hadn't been Time that had stolen first Jack and then Rose from him. It wasn't accident or chance. They'd been ripped away by specific people. Cold, uncaring people. Who continued to live and breathe and enjoy their little lives in this very building.

He felt it again, the surge of fury, of rage. The desire for vengeance disguised as 'justice'. To right the wrong of seeing his entire universe turned to ash once more while those who had done it ate and slept and made love and laughed like nothing had ever happened.

Once he might have given into it, the pain, the grief, the uncontrolled rage within. But it wouldn't help. He knew, with the certainty of past bitter experience, that the only thing he would accomplish would be to bring the very pain he was feeling upon others.

And he would still feel empty.

~~~~~~~~~

Uncounted turns and identical corridors later, they ducked through a grate in the flooring. A short drop (for him, the Scanta seemed a little more shaken), and they were obviously in one of those grungy, necessary, working parts of any building. The kind of place kept underfoot and out of sight for good reason. A glow from one end of the sizable room turned out to be a fire — no, more an incinerator of sorts, he noted absently. A neat and efficient, if highly polluting, way of dealing with trash and other waste.

The Doctor was so close the heat from the fire was burning against his cold skin before he'd even realized he was moving. The three singed and badly-scarred Scanta obviously in charge of the operation looked up at him with wide frightened eyes.

But it was clear they'd nearly finished their latest task. One was poised, bucket over his head, in the very act of tossing the last bit in. A bucket of what looked like kitchen scraps, and one that was far too small to interest him.

He stared into the flames, eyes watering as much from the heat and glare as anything. _Ashes_, he thought, _Jack too almost certainly by now_. If not here, than at some other disposal site. _And again, it all turns to ash, while I am forced to watch. To survive. To somehow carry on_. He was still too much in shock, poised on an internal brink of nothingness. His eyes were watering, but he was still a long way from being able to grieve.

Turning back, he nodded at the Scanta, and again let it lead him out. They stepped out into the dirt and grunge of a well-used back alley. The cool air was a shock upon his overheated face. The sky was just beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn, and the Scanta was obviously anxious to be underway and hidden from prying eyes before day actually broke.

The Doctor followed along obediently. As they skirted the market square he caught sight of the gibbet on which he had last seen Jack draped. It was empty now as he had suspected, the deadly machine looking once again cryptic and innocent as the first rays of dawn touched it.

_Ashes. Everything ashes_.

~~~~~~~~~

Ducking after his guide through a low doorway in what must be a largely Scanta-occupied section of the town, just to judge by the sizing of the architecture, he found himself in a small living space. A hearth and low table at one end defined a kitchen, while a pallet in the far corner served as bed, and a badly battered, but once quite fine, chest obviously rescued from someone's trash presumably held whatever belongings the owner might have.

A small Scanta child sat on a crude bench on the far side of the table, sipping something that looked fairly unappetizing from a cracked pottery bowl. Or, rather, it had been doing so. Like the workers at the incinerator, the child froze mid-action when it saw him, eyes widening in terror.

It was quickly shooed away and out the door by another Scanta — as best as the Doctor could tell in this light, the same one that had gotten them out of the pub before it exploded. _Should have left us to die_, he thought bitterly. Rose and Jack were still gone. He thought of Rose and the previous night. The explosion would have been so much quicker, so much kinder. He imagined it for a second, the three of them laughing and talking, the last thing they saw being the love in each other's eyes. Probably never even knowing what had hit them. _And, if it was bad enough, he might even have managed to go with them_.

Holding down the bitter anger that threatened to overwhelm him, the Doctor let himself collapse slowly into a seated position on the floor next to the table. It put him at about the right height, and it wasn't until he'd stopped moving that he had realized how battered he was in body as well as in spirit.

He waved off offers of food and drink, and simply waited to be told why he was here.

"I am Kuit," the Scanta from the tavern said formally. "And this is Roek," he added, indicating the one who had freed the Doctor from his cell. "We are very sorry for your loss."

He waved that off as well, his mind offering thoughts he didn't want. A mated pair, perhaps? With a child, living in this single room? Had Kuit felt guilty? Was that why Roek had been sent to free him?

The Doctor shoved those thoughts to the side within his own mind. He didn't care, it hardly mattered. _His_ 'mates', his loves were gone and none of this really mattered to him anymore. All he wanted was to be shown back to his ship. To lock himself inside the TARDIS, surrounded by the memories of them, until the pain stopped.

He figured a century or two might do it. The rest of the bloody universe could look out for itself for a change.

"We need your help." It was Kuit or Roek, he hadn't bothered to look up, and he didn't much care.

"I don't do that sort of thing anymore," he countered, looking up at them levelly, coldly. _Not since I lost everything I loved, and all for nothing_, he mused, finding himself once again blissfully detached from himself, his pain, his surroundings. "I just want to leave."

"You can't!" That was Roek, to whom he responded with only a raised eyebrow. After all, the Doctor had nothing to lose anymore, while these people certainly did. One outcry for the guard, one mention of their names in the wrong ears, and he could clearly destroy them.

That he would never do so was not a fact he felt like sharing at this particular moment.

"Please," Kuit begged, with a warning glance towards Roek. "You've seen how the Scanta are treated here. Things get worse by the day, the world we live in isn't even one my grandparents would recognize."

"Then it sounds like you're headed for an imminent social uprising." His words were cold, without feeling. "Riots, civil war, that sort of thing. Eventually it will sort itself out, something will settle in as the new norm, and life will go on as it always does." He'd seen it happen a hundred times and more. This was the path of time, of history. Why should he interfere?

_The rest of them, the Time Lords, They would have been proud of you for that_. The thought echoed hollowly in his head, in the space where they were not any more and would never be again — had, technically, never been. Maybe he had finally learned, after all these years, what they had been trying to tell him all along.

"But the innocent suffer needlessly, while the cruel tyrants—"

"The innocent always suffer," he snapped back, images of Jack and Rose filling his mind. "I don't even know what's gone wrong here or if anything has. Maybe this is the way it's supposed to be." He sighed, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I promise to look it up when I get back to my ship, all right?" He wasn't up to promising any more than that. "But now, I'm leaving."

The Doctor stood, finding himself far more unsteady on his feet than he had expected. He checked his back pocket automatically, and it was only then that he realized the guards still had his sonic screwdriver. "Damn them! Hope they put an eye out with it," he muttered. He was going to miss the jacket too.

He stopped just short of the doorway then, finally registering the panic on Kuit's and Roek's faces. He could destroy them all just by being seen leaving their tiny home. He sighed, but wasn't willing to wait. "I need to get back to the road leading out of the village, the one I" — _we, it had once been 'we'_ — "came in on. You can lead me there via some safe route, or I can just swan my way across the town square." _Maybe they'd just kill him outright this time. Even if it didn't stick, it might help a little._ "But that's where I'm going. Your choice."

There was a moment's huddled conference. Then they crept out of the house, Roek nervously checking the streets around them. Their hesitant, round-about path at last led them to the edge of town. The Doctor could see the road, from where they'd come out through a stand of trees, and the same stupid cow that had been there yesterday morning. The TARDIS would be just around the corner, then and he waved Roek off without another word, watching the Scanta melt back into the shadows of early morning like the hunted prey he was.

~~~~~~~~~

Less than five minutes of walking and he was home again. Home again in a place that had never seemed so empty in all the years he'd lived alone there. The hum of the central console was subdued, the lighting a shade dimmer than usual, as if his TARDIS were grieving for them too. She had her own mind, she did, even if it wasn't one he could ever really understand. But he'd never felt this from her before.

Then again, Jack and Rose were — _had been_ — unlike any companions he'd ever had. Together they had opened his nine-hundred-year-old eyes to a whole new world. Love, devotion, a soul-deep connection between the three of them that he'd never experienced with anyone ever before.

He knew now why human poets were always on about dying from the loss of love. It wasn't a fear they were expressing, but a cherished wish for relief, for release from the pain.

His hands on the console already, it was only the work of seconds to look up the detailed history of Maxion 7 at this particular time period. The Scanta were right. Rose and Jack had been right. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.

Distracted in spite of his grief, or more likely because of it, the Doctor started comparing the time line his histories showed with what he was seeing outside. Even allowing for small anomalies and gaps in the records for a place that was at this point still very much out of the mainstream, this felt all wrong.

Of course he didn't know what he was supposed to do to fix it, and at this point he really didn't care. Time changed, history changed. He couldn't fix it all, and one of these days he wouldn't be around to fix any of it anyway.

Listlessly he started punching in coordinates for a time and place where he could grieve alone and unmolested for the next few eternities. Maybe he'd make a stop for some Eedikik brandy along the way. A case or two of that stuff might hold him for a while.


	4. Chapter 4

As the cart made a jouncing turn on the dirt road in the darkening evening, Jack took his chance, rolled himself off of the back, and kept rolling and twisting once he hit the ground until he felt himself come to rest under some kind of bush or brush pile.

It wasn't easy, muscles held cramped and twisted for hour upon hour protested at being asked to do this now. But he managed it, and apparently without making too much noise, he noted, relieved, as the cart continued its slow, bouncing progress down the road.

It was then that he took a deep breath of relief. It burned, being the first decent breath he'd gotten in probably twelve hours, but it still felt wonderful. And it did wonders in clearing his head.

The cart was continuing out of town with its sad cargo; there was probably some communal pit into which they'd be dumped. Jack didn't exactly see any executed Scanta getting a formal, proper burial out of this. When his body turned up missing, the two Scanta driving might well think his bulky, oversized corpse had just fallen off the overloaded cart. With any luck they wouldn't bother looking for him anytime soon. Possibly ever.

Lying on his back on the hard ground, Jack took a moment to let the cramps in his muscles subside. Absently he started some standard stretches — or as much as he could manage, hidden as he was — while he tried to plan his next move.

The cart, ironically enough, seemed to be heading out more-or-less towards the very field where the TARDIS was parked. But Jack wasn't ready to go back. The Doctor and Rose were still here, presumably still locked up in 'the main block' — which sounded like a central prison of some sort. And he wasn't going anywhere without them.

Lying there, willing his rebelling muscles to relax and behave, he went over everything he'd heard, while playing possum in that sick little merry-go-round of death. He'd been more surprised than anyone else to feel the blade cut along his neck — not between vertebrae as planned, but across the top of a bone.

The cut was deep and painful, he had to acknowledge, raising his hand to the open wound for the first time and wincing at the crusted mess he found there, and had quite possibly nicked the bone itself. But on a machine designed for the much smaller Scanta, even crammed into its constraints as he was, its precision cut had hit a full inch too low. Anticipation and pain had caused him to fall forward, apparently mimicking the slump of the dead sufficiently to cover his own surprise.

But it had taken all his years of training, all his experience in maintaining a cover, pulling a con, not to respond when he heard Rose cry out. To lay there limp, clearing his mind of thought and his body of motion, and giving neither of them any sign he still lived. He had had no doubt he'd be put down like a dog the instant the commander realized his miscalculation, so he held his tongue and his breath and tried everything he could to still the way his heart pounded at every wracking sob he could hear torn from Rose's throat.

Mercifully for his own sanity, the demonstration had been broken up shortly thereafter. As best as he could tell with only his ears straining to catch every bit of information over the creaking of the wheel he lay slumped on, the Scanta had all been dismissed, and the Doctor and Rose arrested. It made sense, he supposed. The thought of 'humans' helping the Scanta obviously caused some serious outrage in these parts, while he suspected the rounding up and execution of Scanta — for show more than justice — happened with disturbing regularity.

The rest of the day had been spent playing dead — not nearly as easy a task as it appeared. With his face hanging down he could see nothing, even had he been willing to risk opening his eyes. So he never knew when eyes might be upon him. The platform rotated on and on, but slowly, and he did his best to ignore that, straining his ears for any clues, any information at all.

Within the first half hour he had had to give up even that much surveillance in favor of concentrating on fighting his own body. Cramped muscles tried to twitch and seize painfully, as he fought to keep his breathing as shallow and even as possible. Flies — or whatever their equivalent in the local food chain was — landed on the back of his neck, tickling him mercilessly, and undoubtedly laying eggs on his supposed corpse, as the sun just rose higher in the sky.

With the rising heat he could smell the decomposing bodies all around him and had to fight the reflex to gag from the stench. Mercifully the smell seemed to be keeping the occasional gawker at a slightly greater distance as well, as he tried to will himself not to sweat.

The flies crawled in and out of his half-opened mouth and he tried to distract himself from reacting by making a list in his head of 'Things To Plan Ahead For When Playing Dead In a Public Square For Hours On End'. He'd come up with quite the comprehensive little how-to volume before he felt the heat of the sun on his back ease off and the temperature begin to slowly drop.

By the time they had come to collect the corpses, he was so stiff he wasn't sure he could have moved if he tried. Fortunately, this didn't seem to phase the two sets of small hands he could feel unfastening him from his bonds. That might have been his greatest test yet — to avoid giving any sign of the agony running through muscles so long denied sufficient blood or movement. Not to make any move to catch himself as they dropped him casually to his side on the platform. To make no hint of muscle movement anywhere a small hand was touching him as they dragged him to the side and tipped him onto the top of the body pile.

It was only when the screaming had subsided in his head that he very, very cautiously risked cracking his lower eye open just a hair. It was clearly twilight, headed for actual evening, and no one was paying him any mind any more. The mercy of going from display object to disgusting item of garbage. He could hear the two Scanta driving the cart talking, in a subdued manner, from the front seat.

With his eyelids slit just a little further open, he realized just how lucky he had been. He was on top of the load, the last one put on, and he was already swaying a bit precariously as the crude wooden wheels hit stones and divets in the road. Doing his best to ignore the screaming pain that surged through his abused body with every little jolt, Jack waited for his chance.

A fairly sharp turn in the road, accompanied by a jouncing bump and he knew this was it. Seconds later, he was lying under what he was now figuring was some kind of brush heap, listening to the cart bounce and rattle its way slowly out of view.

Now he rubbed his eyes in relief, breaking the crusty seal they'd developed and opening his eyes comically wide just because he could. He breathed freely. He wiped his mouth on the least filthy bit of shirt he could find and swallowed, feeling the dry pain rip down his throat.

Water. First he had to find water. Then he had to find the Doctor and Rose. He smiled, feeling the skin on his lips crack.

He had a rescue to plan.

~~~~~~~~~

Contrary to popular belief, getting into a prison — particularly when you had no idea where you were going and couldn't afford to be recognized — could be just as difficult as getting out of one.

The usual movie gambit of knocking a stray guard over the head and stealing his uniform was pretty much a pure fictional conceit. Unless you had full-body, face-disguising armor — and what fool commander would go for that? — _and_ managed to grab someone just your own size, there were going to be problems. In addition, guards — having no one else to associate with other than their prisoners — actually tended to know each other pretty well in his not-so-limited experience.

Even in the biggest establishments, they knew the guards on their block, their row, their unit. Not to mention the trouble of actually finding a guard conveniently alone and off his or her guard, making the move without causing too much noise or attention, and then finding somewhere to stash the body where it wouldn't be immediately spotted.

No, the whole concept was pretty ridiculous from a practical point of view, which was why Jack was so disturbed to catch himself actually considering it. His next thought was to debate — again — the wisdom of heading back out to the TARDIS for reinforcements of the showy, explosive type. He would certainly feel safer with a weapon of some kind, or even a decent pair of lock picks.

He only debated for a second trying to land the time machine inside the prison, targeting whatever cell they had Rose and the Doctor in. As dramatic as that would be, he knew damned well he didn't have the skill to pull that off, even if the TARDIS were willing to work with him on it.

But he didn't want to waste any more time than was necessary. It was too near dawn by this point, and he was about to lose any advantage he had from cover of darkness. He cursed the time it had taken to get himself mobile enough not to attract attention. Not to mention the time spent trying to find the prison without asking for directions or being seen. In the dark. It wasn't as though he'd been able to keep track of the cart's progress from his place in the back of it.

He was here now, but running out of time and still without a plan. He circled around the building again to some dirty back alley where a few moments of scrounging in the improving light managed to snag him a thin sliver of broken metal about the length of his hand that might work as a lock pick of sorts.

Or as a dagger of sorts, if need be.

Peering in an open doorway, he saw an early-morning delivery of supplies. As far as he could see with a quick glance, only Scanta were working in the building's dirtier, less pleasant areas. It took him maybe another five minutes to grab what seemed like a generic enough tunic-and-trousers get-up from some sloppy housewife's neglected clothesline. He figured that was as close as he could get to looking the part of a native.

With any luck, seeing how cowed the local Scanta population was, none of them would question his presence outright. If he was really lucky, he wouldn't meet any humans who might.

Quelling the nerves twisting in his stomach, and hoping that his generally unkempt appearance would be enough to keep anyone from recognizing him as the executed human prisoner laid out for public display in the square yesterday, Jack strode into the back room as casually as he could manage, scooping up a fruit from a loaded basket in one hand and biting into it as he passed, trying not to moan aloud from the pleasure of feeling the juices slide down his parched throat.

Nodding vaguely to the Scanta who seemed to be in charge of the little operation back here, and roundly ignoring everyone else, he made his way to the back of the room and through the door as if he hadn't a care in the world, even carelessly bumping aside one of the Scanta porters with his hip in order to make room to pass through the doorway.

There were murmurs behind him, but no outcry, and no protest. He turned left on a whim and continued walking along as though he belonged there, while desperately looking for some clue as to where he should start looking... or hiding.

He could hear the sounds of humans, probably guard-types, up ahead around the next corner, and he was still short an excuse or a place to hide. He also had a suspicion that his usual emergency back-up plan, seduction, wouldn't go over too well here. Not to mention that he wasn't exactly looking — or smelling, he had to admit — his best at the moment.

What he hadn't expected was the little voice of doubt in the back of his mind that he would want to carry through on a casual seduction anymore. That he even could. That thought worried him. He didn't want to touch or be touched by anyone but Rose or the Doctor, not even 'casually'. He could go through with it if given no other choice, he decided, but he didn't want to think about facing his two lovers afterward. Even if they could forgive him, he wasn't sure he could forgive himself.

So thrown was he by this shift in his own self-image, his own mind set, that Jack failed to remember the imminent danger of the approaching guards. Until the tearing sound and rocking blast of another explosion made the point moot.

Jack grinned for the first time in a day, and headed out at a run. He'd been looking for a distraction and now he'd found one. He'd been looking for a direction, and now he'd found that too. Wherever chaos was breaking loose, the Doctor and Rose couldn't be far away.

~~~~~~~~~

As he had suspected, the chaos and disruption provided more than adequate cover for his approach. In the middle of a crisis, no one was likely to look too closely at the offer of another helping hand, and within moments his face and clothes were sufficiently covered in soot and grime to keep him from worrying about being recognized.

As best as he could tell, the explosion had been centered in one of the guard stations itself. Jack busied himself moving debris and looking helpful while he scanned the area for signs of where the Doctor and Rose might have gone.

It was only after they dislodged a particularly large pile of rubble by pulling loose a broken support beam that Jack really got an idea of the damage that had been caused. The smell of charred flesh came wafting out of the center of the mess in a quantity that nearly made him retch. Several of the guards around him actually did so.

This didn't look like the Doctor's work to him.

Not that he had any doubts the Doctor had killed before and would again, particularly if he was defending Rose, but suddenly something in the sinking pit of his stomach told him this was wrong. All wrong.

Standing back for a second and looking at it with as much objectivity as he could muster, Jack had to admit this looked more like yet another Scanta terrorist attack. Rose and the Doctor might not have had anything to do with it. They might not even be in this wing. And Jack didn't want to stand around long enough for someone to ask him who exactly he was and what he was doing here.

He considered himself a lucky man, but not a stupid one.

Just as he decided to move back and away from the scene, the commander from the day before strode up, fury on his face, and started trying to establish order.

"What happened?" he demanded of the scene at large.

"An explosion—" one of the shakier-looking guards started to respond.

"I can _see_ that!" the commander barked. "Who set it?" When there was no response he snorted at his own question. "Hell, I know that one too. Any prisoners down here?"

"Just those two Scanta-loving humans we brought in yesterday," someone assured him as Jack's heart sank even further.

"Has anyone found them?"

"Not yet, but—"

"How many guards?"

"Sir, it's hard to tell, they were conducting interrogations—" the guard doing his best to respond to his superior in an orderly manner choked as a large piece of wood — a table or a door, it was impossible to tell by now — was lifted away, displaying a pile of charred and smoldering bodies.

Jack wasn't the only one drawing away from the horrific sight and losing what little had made it into his stomach onto the floor of the corridor.

But he was probably the only one that immediately recognized the significance of the pieces of not-quite charred black leather, bits of blonde hair, and the remains of a sonic screwdriver sticking out from the blackened and shapeless mass.

~~~~~~~~~

Stumbling backwards and away from the sight, Jack found a partially damaged cell some ways along the corridor where he could collapse against the wall and think.

Immediately, after he did so, he regretted it.

He had nothing left in his stomach to lose, but the bile burned his mouth as he remembered his joy at hearing the explosion, so bone-deep certain that the Doctor could and would find a way for him and Rose out of any situation.

But he hadn't been hearing their liberation. He'd been hearing their deaths.

Dead of the same mindless violence they'd been spared the day before.

He wanted to strangle the Scanta — but he wasn't sure if he meant the one who'd set this explosion, or the one who'd saved them from the first. _We could have all gone together_.

The two of them had given him his life back. Not just by rescuing his sorry ass from that bomb, but in letting him join them. Letting him find a place, a home with them. Teaching him the meaning of a love that so far transcended the physical pleasures he'd enjoyed for years that he still wasn't sure he had any words to describe it.

And now they were gone. And he was alone again. Only this time knowing all too well exactly what he was missing.

He'd been willing to die if it left them safe, even for the moment. Not happy about it, by any means, but willing. But what was the point of his miraculous escape only to arrive, moments too late from any chance at saving them. _Any chance of dying with them_.

Some tiny dark part of him suggested that a trade had been made and broken. And he found himself screaming inside his own head to take it all back. Trying to bargain as if he were still a child who'd walked into one of his father's cunning word traps and instead of everything found himself left with nothing at all.

Let him have died in the public square if it meant they would be safe. _Or at least let him have died there happy, believing it_.

At least they didn't suffer. _None of us would have suffered at all if we'd just been caught in the first blast the way we were meant to_. Had Rose's Scanta, trying to do a kindness, disrupted history instead? Was this the universe trying somehow to right itself?

_You had better get used to that. There's no one left to do it for you anymore_.

And with that thought he crumpled entirely, giving way to tears his body should have been too dehydrated to produce in the first place.

Rose, the light and energy and frank innocence they all gathered around. Gone. That energy, that love. The biggest heart in all the universe, keeping his own cynicism and the Doctor's bitter pain at bay. Keeping them both grounded by the wonder with which she greeted each new adventure. All that love lost.

He remembered the panicked look on her face right before the cutting blow struck, buried under it somewhere still complete disbelief. Even then she couldn't accept that he was lost. And the sobbing after she was forced to believe, it broke his heart all over again.

He reached back further, to their innocent walk in on the road to this goddammed little hellhole of a town. The feel of her lips against his, her tongue moving against his. The indulgent exasperation on the Doctor's face as he watched them, as they teased Rose about the milch cow only one short day ago.

And the Doctor. Manic to deadly still in the blink of an eye. So much depth, so much pain, and yet still so much capacity left for joy. Jack suspected he could know him, love him, for centuries and still not even scratch the surface.

But oh, how he'd looked forward to trying. He didn't know what The Time Lord had been like before he met Rose, after he'd lost his entire world. But Jack suspected that she, that they, kept him sane. Kept him from being swallowed up into the darkness and despair of what he had seen and what he had lived.

And now he too was gone. Bright smile and big ears and mercurial moods, all of it gone. Soft kisses and hard flesh and an anchor for both he and Rose in the wildly twisting sea of time and space and infinite possibilities.

Gone.

And not just another hole torn open in his own heart, but a terrible loss to an uncaring, unknowing universe. Gallifrey _was_ truly only a myth once more. Nothing of it remained.

Except the TARDIS, still presumably sitting in the field where they'd left her. Unless she'd sensed the Doctor's death and taken off, self-destructed or lost herself in time or whatever a somehow-sentient time ship with a mind of her own might do when she realized she was truly all alone in the universe.

_At least they'd been together when it happened_, Jack thought, trying, and failing to suppress his own bitterness at being left out. At being forced to survive.


	5. Chapter 5

It was the explosion itself that startled Rose awake.

She was, she realized after a few moments of disorientation, curled up on the floor against the back wall of her cell. They must have dumped her there when she passed out from the pain.

Reflexively she shifted her right arm and nearly screamed anew as the solid throbbing turned to excruciating pain once more.

She was hungry and thirsty and sore, and the throbbing from her untreated arm made thinking difficult, which is why it took her a full minute to realize that the explosion had torn her cell door nearly clean off its hinges.

Biting down, hard, on her lip to keep from whimpering in pain, she managed to get to her feet. The Doctor had found a way out. Any second he would meet her at the door, hold out his hand, and they would be off and running again. The hallway was a wreck of twisted debris, smoke and dirt so thick she could hardly see, and—

The source of the smell that hit her came back to her all too vividly from the night before and left her on her knees retching from an empty stomach. Burned flesh. Dead bodies. Another terrorist attack.

Not the Doctor.

Maybe if he'd had to, if there had been no other way to rescue her — she didn't like to think about what he might be prepared to do for her. But if so, then where was he? Why weren't they already gone and halfway back to the TARDIS by now — stopping only for Jack. To cut him out of that horrific machine. She couldn't bear the thought of just leaving him like that.

But then the Doctor. Where was he?

Rose managed to get back on her feet again. Trying to find a way to cradle her injured arm so that the burned flesh didn't touch anything else — and only partly successful — she stumbled over to the cell door. Figuring if she couldn't see anyone else in the thick, reeking haze, they couldn't see her, she ducked out and into the hallway.

The target of the attack was clear within only a few stumbling steps — by which point she had already jarred her sore arm more times than she wanted to remember, and had picked up a nice, dark, camouflage coating of soot that, she hoped, made her nearly indistinguishable from anyone else stumbling around in the mess.

She stopped long enough to pull her hoodie up over her hair though, just to be sure.

The guard station, the same one that had kept the hallways too busy for escape before they'd been split up and tortured — and her heart sank at the thought of the Doctor being tortured as well — was a pile of rubble, with damaged support beams that looked like they might bring the whole roof of the corridor down on their heads before long.

She heard the guard captain bellowing not five feet away from her in the murky light and pulled away so quickly she nearly tripped again.

"Any prisoners down here?"

"Just those two Scanta-loving humans we brought in yesterday." Rose backed up further until her back hit the wall. Where was the Doctor?

"Has anyone found them?"

"Not yet, but—"

"How many guards?"

"Sir, it's hard to tell, they were conducting interrogations—" the guard made a choking noise as something else was shifted in the rubble and the sickening smell got immediately, terribly worse. Forcing herself forward enough to see, her stomach having apparently given up on trying to empty itself of nothing for the time being, she saw a truly sickening mess of charred and smoldering bodies.

She almost turned away, to continue her quest, when she saw it and had to bite down on her wrist to muffle a scream. The Doctor's sonic screwdriver — or what was left of it — protruded from the charred mass. Forcing herself to look again, to be sure, she also saw pieces of his jacket lying smoldering on the ground.

As she backed away down the hall, not caring where she was going, the guard's voice echoed in her head: _They were conducting interrogations._

No.

They were the only two prisoners down here.

No.

They hadn't taken the screwdriver or the jacket off of him.

No.

He was gone too. And she was all alone.

_No!_

Curled up against herself, not even feeling the pain in her damaged arm, she slid down into a corner just off the corridor, becoming just one more dark shape in the ruins.

He wasn't able to save Jack.

_No!_

He wasn't able to protect you.

_No!_

He wasn't able to save himself.

_NO!_

The tears were running unnoticed down her cheeks again, her sobbing, gasping breaths in the smoke-filled corridor too much like coughing to even draw attention.

_You have to leave, Rose_.

It was the Doctor's voice in her head, telling her something she wasn't at all ready to hear just yet.

_Sweetheart, they're just going to catch you again_.

Jack that time, joining in the sick chorus of dead lovers in her head.

_What am I supposed to do?_ she wailed at them in her mind. _Alone? I can't lose you both!_

There was no answer to that.

Finally registering that the smoke was beginning to clear and that the captain of the guard was still there, only meters away from her, Rose somehow found her feet and started quietly and unobtrusively stumbling the opposite way down the hall.

But somehow, moving her feet had started her brain moving again too. The Doctor, _her Doctor_, was dead. Gone. Lost to her forever, just like Jack. The man who had taken a London shop girl from a council estate and seen something in her. Seen that she could be so much more. Had held out his hand to her and led her into adventures she'd never even dreamed of.

The first man she'd ever really loved. And not even a man at all—

She stumbled on nothing at that thought. The Time Lords. Gallifrey. He was the last— had been the last. There was nothing left now. No one to wander around saving innocents and fixing things gone wrong. No one to try over and over to save the universe from itself.

His people. A thousand other worlds, he'd said. Nine hundred years of seeing what no one else ever saw, not really. No one to remember it all. Nothing left but the tiny pieces he'd given her.

Nothing except The TARDIS.

_Oh, God. The TARDIS. Did it know?_ The Doctor had said it got into your head, had talked about it having a mind of its own. How much of that was true? Would it know? Would she have to tell it somehow?

And then what?

Rose stopped dead in the hallways at the realization that she had nowhere left to go. _Back to the TARDIS. They always headed back to the TARDIS. It was home. It was safety._

It was stuck here.

She hadn't the faintest idea how to fly any kind of ship, let alone something like the Doctor's one-of-a-kind time machine. She would be safe in there, no one could get to her.

And she could get nowhere.

There was a garden, there was food in more kitchens than she probably knew existed. She giggled almost hysterically at the thought that there was a cow right out front if she needed milk.

She could call home anytime she liked.

She could probably live in there forever. Until she died of old age. Alone. Living in a box that had once meant freedom and would now be nothing more than a kind of virtual reality prison.

Trapped for good on a planet alone with the same monsters who had killed the only two people she wasn't actually sure she could live without.

At that thought she gave up. She couldn't help the sobs that escaped her throat as she sank down again against the corridor wall. What did it matter? What did any of it matter anymore?

~~~~~~~~~

When she felt the hand reach for the front edge of her hoodie and pull it back, stripping away her disguise and exposing her to whatever the guards might have in mind next, she decided she didn't care. With nothing left, she might as well be dead already.

When she slowly looked up, she was convinced she was.

"Jack?" she asked, her voice eerily calm even to her own ears. "So, I'm dead now too?"

With a wrenching pull that brought back all of the pain in her abused arm, she was pulled to her feet. All she could think was that you weren't supposed to still feel pain when you were dead. She felt cheated.

But then she felt Jack's lips against hers, desperate, frantic, and feeling very much alive, and she started crying all over again.

"Jack?" she said as they parted. "I don't understand—"

But instead of answering, with a quick tug he pulled her inside the slightly warped cell she'd been leaning against, pulled her into the dark shadows of the back corner, and wrapped his arms tightly around her.

"You're alive, Rose!" He breathed against her ear, the wonder in his voice warming her, even as it made no sense.

"_I'm_ alive?" she sputtered, hand reaching up automatically to the back of his neck and feeling the scabbed mess there. She pulled back to get a better look at him, even if all she could really see were his eyes shining in the faint light from the hallway. "_I'm_ not the one who got executed in the market square yesterday morning!"

She pushed him away, suddenly. Too many emotions. Too many revisions of her world in far too short a time. She looked up at him with outrage, as if daring him to tell her he was really alive.

"The cut missed, Rose," he said. He eyed her cautiously, like an animal — either a dangerous one who might strike out, or a timid one likely to flee at the slightest startle. She couldn't blame him: She wasn't quite sure which one she was right now either.

"The machine was designed for Scanta. They tried to cram me in there, but the blade hit the wrong spot. It hit bone, Rose."

Part of her was processing his words, making sense of his story, while another part refused to believe, was too scared to believe it could be true. "But I _saw_ you," her voice broke on the word. "You were lying there, _dead_."

Some piece of her mind could not believe she was arguing with him. She'd just had a genuine miracle come true right in front of her very eyes and she was arguing with it? _But that was just the point,_ another piece pointed out, one that sounded suspiciously like her mother, of all things. _If the miracle's real, you won't be able to argue it away._

"I had to pretend, Rose. If they'd realized that they missed, they'd have just killed me some other way." He was stepping forward, cautiously, slowly as he spoke. "I'm so sorry, I never wanted to have to put you through that. But I'm not dead, Rose. I never was."

The next sob she buried in his shoulder as she flung her arms around him, feeling him warm and safe and alive in her arms — she couldn't stop crying, although she thought she would long ago have run out of tears.

He held her back just as tight, the sound of tears in his voice as well. "I couldn't get away until they sent a cart for the bodies that night. Then I had to find a way in, and just as I did I heard the explosion. When I got there I saw—"

He couldn't say it, and she didn't want him to. She nodded against his chest to let him know she understood, that the words didn't have to be said, never had to be said.

"Oh, God, Rose, I thought you were with him, I thought I'd lost you both."

She clutched him even tighter against her, ignoring the screaming pain in her badly burned arm. "Me too, Jack," she whispered against his shoulder. "I thought I was all alone."

He pulled back then, slowly, having to wait as she released him even that much. "No," he said. "We're not alone. We still have each other."

What and who they had both lost was left an unspoken hole shared by both their hearts.

The involuntary gasp of pain that escaped as her abused arm brushed against his side was enough to re-focus Jack's attention squarely on her. "Rose?" Seeing the way she cradled the arm against her chest he reached out for it, gently pulling it out towards him and moving the sleeve away. "Oh my god, Rose, what happened?" he hissed as he saw the red, weeping sores just below her elbow.

She found herself laughing, with an edge of hysteria to it that she tried desperately to keep some control over. "They didn't like us much," she said, wincing as he moved her arm, trying to see the extent of the damage in the dim light. "Traitors to our race, they called us." She whimpered as he turned her arm and the skin pulled. "Then they took the Doctor away and brought in the torturers."

Jack was looking at her with a sick horror in his eyes. "Rose, what did they do to you?"

"Just that," she assured him, nodding at her arm. "At first the guards wanted to...," she shuddered and his arm around her shoulders tightened. "But one of them was convinced I was sleeping with the Scanta." Her bursts of laughter weren't sounding any less hysterical, but she didn't know what to do about that. "So I said I had. Made them all so sick they wouldn't even stay in the same room with me."

"So they didn't—"

"No," she broke in, shuddering at the memory of the fear that had filled her for long agonizing minutes. "They left and called in the guy who did this." She gestured to her arm, trying not to actually move it. "Oh, but Jack, they wanted to. I was tied to this board and there were seven of them and I was so scared...."

Her voice broke completely at the end, some detached part of her mind wondering why it was what _hadn't_ actually happened to her that felt like it was pulling her to pieces inside.

But as painful as the fire had been, it was only pain. In those long moments Rose had faced one of her worst nightmares. One made even worse by the thought that those bastards could taint or even destroy some of her happiest memories. Her memories of Jack and of the Doctor. Of holding them. Of loving them. Of feeling the pleasure of their skin against hers. The security of them holding her. The feel of them deep inside her body, becoming a part of her....

Her mind flashed to the leering faces of the guards and suddenly she twisted to the side, ignoring the burning pain in her arm, and began to retch. Jack held her carefully, pulling her hair aside, and muttering soothing words as he gently rubbed her back. But there was still nothing to come up, and after a few moments, her body abandoned the attempt.

Rose found herself sitting on Jack's lap where he sat against the wall of the cell, and curled into his arms, sobbing. He held her tightly, and she clung to his shirt, to the warmth and strength and smell of him. The solid, comforting presence she never thought she'd have again.

Looking up she found his eyes, and then his lips with her own. They stayed like that for a moment, communicating everything through that simple touch, before Rose decided she needed more. Her mind tried to block out doing this with the Doctor only hours ago, when it had been Jack they were mourning. Her hands began to roam over Jack's body, desperately, pulling at his clothes, trying to reach bare skin. His hands closed on the sides of her head as though he was trying to bury himself in her mouth, and then he gently pulled their faces apart.

"Rose, we can't, not now." Pressed up against him so closely she could feel his response, even if she hadn't been able to hear it in his voice. He gasped a little as she moved against him, but shook his head all the same. "Rose, we're still in danger. We need to get out of here."

She slumped against him, defeated. She knew he was right, and she certainly didn't want to risk losing him again. And yet somehow, leaving — the two of them leaving alone — was the final admission that the Doctor was never coming with them again. She nodded, tears falling freely down her face. They stumbled to their feet, Jack still trying to avoid doing any more damage to her arm, and snuck back out into the rapidly clearing hallway.


	6. Chapter 6

Remembering his earlier path as best he could, hoping that the hallways on this side of the building mirrored those he'd come down on the other, and trying not to be distracted by the smoke and debris, Jack led the way back to the loading dock he'd arrived through.

This time he didn't bother with stealth or nonchalance, he just tore through the doorway, one hand on Rose's good arm, and tried to make the fastest getaway for them that he could. He needn't have worried anyway. Whether due to guilt or to well-justified fear, the dock was empty. Not a single Scanta in sight. Jack was grateful for the clean escape, and also for the lack of temptation. If he thought he could figure out who had actually set that explosion, killing the Doctor and nearly Rose as well, Jack wasn't sure what he might end up doing about it.

Turning the corner and out into the alley, he was dismayed to notice it was full daylight by now. In their torn and dirtied clothes, Rose and he would stand out glaringly amongst any of the other humans. They needed to get to the TARDIS and fast, but Jack couldn't be sure how to get them there.

The general direction — back across the market square and out the city road — might be clear enough, but there was no obvious way to manage that without making a spectacle of themselves and drawing far too much attention. His muscles were still screaming from a day of abuse and neglect, and Rose clearly wasn't in much better shape. He didn't think much of their chances in a flat out foot race for the half-mile or so back to safety, to where they'd started this whole thing.

But he didn't know the town well enough to take any back ways. Cursing, he tried to come up with a plan, quick, before guards from the prison or someone from the early-morning streets outside spotted them. Then the sound of approaching footsteps gave him no more time to think.

Moving swiftly in the opposite direction, he pulled Rose around the corner into what turned out to be another deserted alleyway, and then the opposite direction into a third. Jack knew better than to trust their luck any further than that, though, and when he saw an old, heavy, wooden door to what looked like some kind of shed or warehouse bowed open just enough to make the latch inside reachable, he sprang at the chance.

Moving right over and not even bothering to look around — no time to look casual; if they were spotted they were dead anyway — he managed to work his hand in between the door and its frame, twisting his fingers up just high enough to knock the simple drop-latch free. He tried not to think about the creaking noise the door made as he shouldered it open far enough to get them inside. It couldn't be echoing that loud — loud enough to bring out every householder for miles around — he knew it was only his fear that made it sound that way. He ushered Rose through and turned his head, frantically scanning the immediate area for a weapon of some kind — any kind — in case they needed to defend themselves against the inhabitants.

But after a moment, it became clear that the only inhabitant was a single cow, tied to an iron loop on the wall and staring at them with calm, uncaring, brown eyes. Sparing a breath of relief, Jack set about closing the door a bit more securely than it had been left that morning.

"It's a cow," Rose said, and he listened, trying to decide if he could still hear the tinge of hysteria in her voice. "We found another _cow._"

Pulling her against him for comfort as they recovered from their desperate run, he had to agree. "Yup, it's a cow." She snickered, turning her head into his chest and he held her there for a moment. More importantly, it was a cow that had already been milked that morning and left fresh food and water. There was little else in the small space but the milking stool and bucket, and a rake and handcart by the door — presumably both arrangements designed to deal with what naturally came out of the cow.

There was straw, relatively clean, scattered across the floor, and Jack started to move them to the back corner, out of reach of the placid animal, just in case it should decide to object to their presence. Kicking over a pile of straw as a cushion of sorts, he settled Rose on the floor. Then taking the milk bucket, he filled it with relatively clean-looking water from the cow's trough and hauled that over as well.

Collapsing beside Rose Jack felt like he could finally stop and rest for a moment, for the first time in much too long. He gently pulled Rose's arm out again, angling it into the rays of sunlight coming through two small, dusty windows high up in the wall.

The burns looked nasty, and Jack fought down his rage at the thought of anyone doing this to Rose deliberately. Reaching inside his clothes, he found a pocket of sorts inside the tunic and ripped the relatively clean fabric free. The burns had already cooled, he noted, trying to kick back into his basic-field-training mindset, and should probably be allowed to stay un-bandaged. But with all the running they were still doing, he figured it might be better to try to protect them.

He resisted the urge to try to clean them, knowing it would be painful and unnecessary — just as soon as they got back to the TARDIS, five minutes with a dermal regenerator and she'd be healed as good as new. Jack just hated having to wait.

Deciding they were as safe as they were going to be for a while, Jack pulled off his stolen tunic. At Rose's look of surprise he just smiled. "We're too conspicuous all dirty like this, and someone's going to be back to milk that cow again before it gets too dark." He plunged the fabric into the bucket of water, then reached for her face. "We need to get ourselves cleaned up a bit."

~~~~~~~~~

Rose felt the rough brush of the wet cloth on her face. She kept her eyes fixed on Jack, on his eyes as she let him wash her face clean. There was something so intimate in this, in just sitting there and letting him take care of her this way. Down one cheek and then the other, over her brow, down the line of her nose, polishing the lines of her jaw.

She didn't know when the cleaning strokes had become the caresses of a lover — maybe between them they could be nothing else — but she could see by the darkness in Jack's eyes that he felt the same pull, the same intensity. As he rinsed out the cloth and raised it again to her neck, she found herself tilting to one side, exposing her throat, leaning into the touch of the cold water as goose bumps rose along her skin.

When he had cleaned all he could reach down to her neckline, she took the cloth from him without a word, rinsed it again, and began removing the dirt and grime from his face. _Lost,_ she kept thinking, as she traced every familiar, beautiful line in that face. _All of this was almost lost._ And not just the pretty face, but the strength, the courage, the gentleness she had seen in those eyes. The sense of humor and lighthearted joy she'd seen bring a genuine smile to those lips, so different from the pretty, shallow imitation that masked something, someone, so much deeper.

A small groan escaped from him as she moved from his face to his neck, instinctively, shamelessly arching up under her touch. She could feel the slow burn inside of her, the continuation of the need she'd felt finally holding him once again in the prison, that prison where....

She moved from his neck to his bare chest, largely kept clean under the tunic she held in her hands, and hardly likely to give them away unless he went out half-dressed. In which case _everyone_ would be staring and it wouldn't be because of the dirt. But she continued the bath anyway, stroking, caressing, feeling him.

As the bunched up tunic dried out she dropped it to one side, needing to feel for herself, with her own skin, the warmth and heat and life in his body. Running her hands across his chest, she could feel the strong, steady beat of his heart, the reassuring curve of muscle under the skin. The small, sharp cry as she teased at a nipple, feeling it harden under her hand, struck something deep within her. He was alive. They were alive. And in this moment that was all that mattered.

Without even knowing who moved first, she found her lips against his again, her tongue tracing that familiar, moist heat. The sensation of his hands cradling the back of her head as he crushed his mouth against hers, sharing each breath until they finally pulled apart, gasping for air. He reached for her waist then, carefully peeling off both the singed, filthy hoodie and the shirt beneath it. Leaving them pulled inside out, he tossed them just behind her, then proceeded to strip off her bra as well.

They sat there for a moment, bare-chested, fingers lightly tracing the other's shape. Taking their time, they explored the details, every inch of precious, living skin: From the puckered skin of a nipple to the smooth line of a breastbone. The feel of ribs underneath, moving unsteadily with each breath, and the constant drumming of a heartbeat, testimony to what had almost been lost.

Then Jack pulled her close in another kiss, and she wrapped her good arm tightly around him as well, loving the feel of her sensitive breasts rubbing against his chest as he lowered her slowly backwards. The clothes he'd tossed behind her formed a cushion between her bare back and the scratchy bed of straw. He made a point also of gently pulling her injured arm to the side, laying it with the burns facing up, where it might be safe from painful contact. Briefly, he kissed the air above each mark.

Leaving the injured arm there, Rose used the other to pull him back to her, away from the memories of pain and back to the miracle of their survival. He pressed a soft kiss to her lips once more, then slid down to trace patterns on her chest with his tongue. He slowly laved a trail around one breast, spiraling in until he'd almost reached the nipple, then giving it only the softest passing brush of his lips as he moved over to repeat the process on her other side.

Whimpering with the promised treat denied her, Rose nonetheless managed to lay still, both arms splayed out, as she simply gave in to the sensations. When Jack pulled away with only a brush to the second nipple, however, Rose responded. Without conscious thought her good arm came up, cupping the back of his head and urging him back down to her chest.

Startled, she felt the crusted wound along the back of his neck at the same time she heard his hiss of pain. She moved her hand away immediately with a look of horror — at having hurt him, at having forgotten, at the reminder of all the suffering....

His fingers on her lips stopped the apology before she could voice it. Then, with a chuckle — the bare brush of breath against her desperate skin making her shiver — he obliged her original demand, closing the warm, moist softness of his mouth over one nipple, enveloping it in sensation as he began to suckle and tease. His hands tracing the curve of her sides, the dip of her waist, he switched sides, bringing relief at last, while leaving the first side wet and hardening even more in the cool morning air.

Rose groaned, feeling the heat building between her thighs, where he'd not even touched yet. She slipped her good hand carefully from the back of his head, down his back, and then around his hip, working it under the waistband of his stolen trousers to cup the hardness within. Her surprise at finding no barrier at all between her hand and his hot flesh only made her feel restricted, uncomfortable where her own swollen sex was pushing against her suddenly tight jeans.

Sliding her hand away almost immediately, ignoring Jack's moan of protest, she reached for her own pants, desperately trying to unfasten them one-handed. Just as her frustration was building to the point where she was going to use her burned arm and damn the pain it would reawaken, Jack slid his own hands down to help her. First stripping off her trainers and socks, he smoothly unfastened her jeans and started to pull them and her knickers off at once.

Rose lifted her hips to help, then yelped at the unexpected feel of straw poking into her bare bottom when she tried to relax again. With a grin, Jack put one hand under her, helping her to stay in the air as he slipped the pants off first one foot and then the other. Deftly, he pulled the discarded jeans back under her, giving her some protection from the itchy, pokey bits of straw.

"Done this in stables a lot, have you?" Rose asked, unable to keep the amusement out of her voice. Jack just grinned and laughed. Frankly, the proverbial 'roll in the hay' had always sounded like a nice, soft prospect to Rose. But she was realizing the reality didn't quite match the fantasy. Or maybe the people using haystacks just kept more of their clothing on, she mused, gratefully watching Jack making quick work of his trousers and then moving to tuck them under her as well.

Slowly lowering himself over her, she reveled in the feel of the full length of his bare skin against hers, even as she realized he had nowhere else to comfortably lie. Resting most of his weight on his forearms alongside her chest and on his knees between her thighs, he moved in slowly for a long, slow, almost chaste kiss. She could feel his hardness rubbing against her softness, and her knees came up automatically, inviting, demanding.

He pulled back then, only far enough to focus his eyes on hers, and slowly slid into her. The feel sent shivers straight up her spine at the same time she found tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. He nodded as if to say he understood — when she wasn't even sure she did herself — and kissed them gently away as he started to move.

They rocked slowly together, the stress and exhaustion of the last day leaving them without need for the frantic coupling she had desired only an hour ago. This was life, this was renewal. But it was also loss, she realized as she saw the sadness in Jack's eyes as well. They had never been two alone, and the pain of their mutual loss echoed somehow in every motion. Even as their movements became faster, more desperate, even as they each finally found release and relief in the fullness of each others bodies, that aching empty space was there.

And as they lay there, bodies sated, souls relieved, they were both crying silent tears for the missing part of their hearts.

~~~~~~~~~

Well before dusk, which seemed to come early in this place, at least at this time of year, Jack and Rose were ready to go. They had washed most of the accumulated grime from themselves. Jack's tunic had been wrung out and laid on the straw to dry. It was now a darker, distinctly dingier shade of green than it had been when he'd started, but at least the color was even, it was nominally clean, and it was long enough to cover most of what dirt wouldn't brush off of the trousers.

Not having any native clothes with which to disguise Rose, they had settled for concealing as much of her as possible. Back in her shirt and jeans, Jack helped her carefully maneuver the hoodie on over her injured arm, which he'd wrapped carefully in the clean fabric of the pocket he had torn from his pants. Inside out, the seams showed on the jacket, but they didn't look any odder than her jeans in a place like this, and the pale fabric at least looked far more respectable than the dirty, torn side she had been wearing out earlier.

As they paused at the door, Jack pulled the hood up tight to cover the bright gold of her hair and as much of her face as possible. The sun was only just setting, but they didn't dare wait much longer for fear of being discovered in their hideout. An outcry of 'thief' was just the sort of thing they needed to avoid most right now.

Peering out, Jack scanned the alley until he was reasonably sure there was no one to see them emerge from the stable. Moving quickly he pushed the door shut behind them, not bothering with the latch, wrapped his arm around Rose's shoulder, and started walking at a brisk pace that was just slow enough not to look suspicious or draw attention.

He hoped.

At one point they actually managed to lose themselves in a small crowd of people gathered around a corner puppet show. The little stage was turned to take advantage of the last rays of light, and attempting to divert people making their way home after a long day for a few moments of rest (and a few coins of appreciation). Jostled suddenly as they tried to make their way around the knot of people, he heard Rose try — and fail — to stifle a cry of pain as her injured arm was pushed against a wall.

The sound brought a few stares, but Jack kept his head down solicitously and kept them moving, and no one's attention seemed to linger over-long. He hated this, hated the fact that she was still in pain, still suffering. The first thing they were doing when they reached the TARDIS, the key to which he'd checked for and seen tucked safely in its usual place in her jeans pocket, was going straight to the medical bay and fixing up her arm. Frankly it was only the thought of being able to do so that let Jack even think of her wounds without worry. The one burn in particular was large and deep, and he'd hate to think what kind of infections she might be picking up in it already.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to fix the cut on his neck at the same time. He didn't even want to think about what might be starting to crawl around in that crusted wound by now.

Turning another corner, Jack almost crowed with delight. He recognized this shop, the pile of discarded, broken barrels behind it. They were nearly to the point where he'd dropped off the cart, nearly to the edge of the town and the freedom and obscurity of the open countryside.

It was a matter of only a few more moments before he was guiding Rose around an open stable yard, where a few horses contentedly munched on their evening meal of grain, and through a tangle of underbrush to the sweeping landscape spread out below. For a moment Jack debated taking at least one of the horses. It wasn't far to where they'd left the TARDIS, but every moment they could cut off the trip was one less where they could be caught, one less where Rose would be in pain.

Ultimately, Jack decided against it, steering Rose towards a stand of trees that ran through one of the farms. The risk that someone would spot them in the attempt, that the horses would make too much noise at their approach, that whatever beast they picked would turn out too difficult to mount or ride. It wasn't worth it. He might want the relief of a quick dash down the main road, hooves pounding beneath them, but they'd made it this far by being stealthy, and he was determined not to break their lucky streak now.

Knowing they would be visible to anyone for miles under the slowly rising moon was the reason he was avoiding the road itself as well. He could use it as a guide, while sticking to the more concealing shadows of trees, field fences, and the occasional outbuilding.

Rose was beginning to waver on her feet as they reached what he roughly judged to be the halfway point, but she kept on following his lead, blindly trusting him to find their way home. He felt a stab in his chest at that, marveling once again at seeing the proof that she trusted him without thought, without reservation. It may have been true from her — even from the Doctor — for some time now, but it was still such a new and fragile feeling within him. They knew who he was, what he'd done, and they trusted him anyway.

It brought a sliver of fear to his mind, a fear of somehow failing that trust, and he recalculated for the hundredth time where they were in relation to the road. What if someone had finally noticed the TARDIS? What if there were people there, guards blocking the way? He tried not to think of such things as his steps sped up slightly and Rose stumbled along behind.

The problem with coming at the spot this way, instead of from the road, was that he wouldn't be able to see their destination until they were upon it. Better to not be that exposed, he knew, but something within him desperately wished he could see the reassuring blue shape awaiting them.

Jack was almost past the last screen of trees before he realized it, putting out an arm to catch Rose as he stopped suddenly before he betrayed all his most basic training. There was no point in getting this far if they were to be caught at the last second due to his carelessness. He leaned close to Rose's ear, whispering "Key" and leaving her to fumble for it as he moved forward to check that the last stretch of their path home was clear.

He heard her move up behind him, a small confused sound escaping her throat, as she pushed alongside where he had frozen in shock. Without being able to tear his eyes away from the sight before him, he reached down reflexively as she held her hand out with the key, knowing before he even touched it that it would be cold and dead.

The grass where the TARDIS had stood still held a faint imprint. But the TARDIS itself was gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Setting course for the empty space that had once held Gallifrey had seemed like a good idea at the time. _Ashes to ashes,_ as humans said. _Dust to dust._ He had hoped to find solace in solitude, to somehow bury his most recent pain in the emptiness of a much greater loss.

Only it didn't seem all that much greater to him right now. The Doctor had survived the loss of his world, had learned to live again, to love....

But that was all gone now. _They_ were all gone now. Lost to nothing more than the little, small-minded ape prejudices humans managed somehow to carry across the galaxy with them. How anyone could move among the stars, see other worlds, other creatures, and not have their minds expanded, lightened, inspired by it, he would never understand. But somehow it was the very diversity of the universe that he found such beauty in that caused some to cower in fear, to hide away from the splendor of it all in their own little minds.

The Doctor had always known this. For all his absurd fondness for the human race, he'd never been blind to their dark side, the potential they had, not only for great things, but for pettiness and stupidity and cruelty. He'd seen it enough over the years. In all times and all places. It waned or grew with changing times and places, but it was never gone completely. Even Jack and Rose had carried that legacy inside themselves.

_But I loved them._ In spite of their flaws, their weaknesses. Because of them. Including them. He had loved the way those human frailties he was always teasing them about shaped them, made them who they were, as much as their brighter, more noble qualities.

But now that darkness had consumed them. He had taken those two precious souls to a place so dark and callous that it had crushed them, cruelly, deliberately.

The empty bottle of Nylosin fire juice struck the far wall with a satisfying crash and he tugged Time just a little bit slower to watch as the shards scattered from the point of impact and arched to the floor in fleeting glints of light and color.

It was all he'd been able to find in the entire ship, an old case of a drink so strong it would have killed his companions, or at least left them brain-fried breathing corpses. He'd drunk it all — that was the last bottle — even managed to get fairly stewed on it, which was quite the trick with his physiology. But the pain he was feeling was still no better.

As they hung there in space, in nothingness, a grieving creature in a grieving ship, he could feel himself dying inside. When Gallifrey had... gone, it had been too big of a shock to take in at once. He'd been dealing with a new regeneration at the same time — confusing enough in its own way, and always leaving little gaps of memory that took time to settle out, to remember so that they could rip at his soul.

He had none of that now. Even then, once he had managed to recover, to make himself functional again, he had ended up chasing death as much as avoiding it. The thrill that came from the fear of dying had been replaced by anticipation of the day when it would finally catch up to him again. As if another regeneration would put more distance between him and his pain.

As if he didn't keep finding himself diving eagerly into situations no amount of regenerations would let him escape.

He had always loved life, enjoyed it far too much to be capable of ending it himself. But looking back he could see that he'd barely even been fooling himself. He'd wanted to die, to follow his people into oblivion. He'd practically courted death like a lover.

Until he met Rose. She had brought back a spark, a purpose to his life, to his travels. He had still been into self-sabotage — taking her for her first trip to watch the death of her own world had been almost a plea for her to leave him, to prove unequal to the life he lived, to leave him alone and free again to destroy himself by pieces.

But she had stayed, putting far more faith in him from the start than he had been able to put in himself for much too long a time. And he had found himself responding to that, to the chance to see the wonder in the universe again through her fresh eyes. Finding a purpose in showing her what she could truly be.

And at some point it had become more than that. He'd never been able to pinpoint when, but somewhere along the journey she had become more than just his reason for stepping out the TARDIS door. She had become someone separate and precious to him, touching a place in him no other companion ever had.

And then Jack. Very much bigger on the inside than he appeared on the outside. Laughter and energy hiding wounds that ran deep. Flirting, boisterous sexuality covering a core of solid courage and feeling. Jack had become a bridge of sorts between Rose and himself. Caught himself somewhere between innocence and pain, he'd been able to reach out equally to both of them.

For all of his initial resistance, the Doctor suspected that, without Jack between them, he and Rose would never have taken that final step. Would never have reached out to each other with quite enough vulnerability on his side, or quite enough courage on hers. But together, they had been magic.

Rose had been used to thinking in terms of couples, while he had been used to thinking in terms of solitude — even long before he had forced the situation out of his own hands. It was Jack that had pulled them into a trio, a triangle — perhaps even a pyramid, with the TARDIS herself at the fourth point, he thought as he looked at the dimmed lights and subdued noises she had been making ever since...

Three together, each side supporting the others. A pyramid, the most stable structure in three dimensions... and some petty, stupid, little apes who didn't want to see beyond their own noses had torn it to shreds.

The Doctor got up from the chair he'd been slouched in for the past... he didn't even know how many hours, and strode towards the control room again.

He knew what he wanted to do, he wanted to slowly eviscerate every single one of the monsters that had torn both his hearts out and burned them to ash in front of him all over again.

But he wouldn't. He knew better than to think that would solve anything, much less ease his pain. He could, however, try to stop the cruelty. Change what was happening. Do something hopefully wild and terribly dangerous to set Maxion 7 back on the right course.

And, with any luck, he wouldn't have to survive it himself.

~~~~~~~~~

Jack actually found himself collapsing to the ground, like the proverbial puppet with its strings cut away. Rose sank down beside him, still clearly confused, but Jack's mind was elsewhere. _The TARDIS was gone._ He'd thought of the possibility once before, before he'd found Rose, when he thought he'd be facing this world all alone. But it had only been a fleeting thought, a meaningless possibility in the face of what he had lost.

Now he was faced with cold truth. He didn't know what happened to a TARDIS when its Time Lord was destroyed. Much less to the last one in the universe, the last even semi-sentient connection to a lost world. Maybe it had self-destructed in grief. Maybe it had instinctively returned home, only to drift forever in a place where nothing was, nor ever had been.

It didn't really matter. Ultimately what mattered was that he and Rose were stuck here. No defense. No shelter. No medical supplies. Destined to live out the rest of their lives trapped amongst the very people who had destroyed those lives. Who had tortured and killed them.

The hopelessness of the situation overwhelmed Jack. He heard himself responding to Rose's questions, but he didn't even hear the words he said. And when she curled into his side, sobbing, all he could do was slide an arm around her, offering comfort he didn't have it within himself to give.

~~~~~~~~~

The Doctor aimed for the center of town this time, for the cell block itself. He still didn't have a plan, but he wasn't about to let that stop him. As best as he had been able to tell, the prison must house the government of this place as well as any and all malefactors. It made sense, especially in a place this small — for all he knew, that guard captain ran the entire town — and there was nothing he could spot from a distance to suggest another target.

_Where's a nice big tyrant's castle when you really needed one?_ he thought. _Some place you could zero in on as both the physical and social center of the problem. Find some nasty alien creep lording it over helpless, clueless technological inferiors as their Lord and Master. Their God, even. Take out the masquerading fraud, and then leave, letting the people restore their own time line, left in peace for a while._

It happened all the time, the very availability of time travel — in certain eras and usually at great cost — spread naturally. Why make a small fortune selling the technology to your neighbors when you could use it yourself, go back before it was available, and sell the magic for any asking price you demanded? It wasn't only humans that seemed to be driven endlessly by greed. Or power. Find a warlord in his own time and offer him the chance to rule his whole world. Or talk a spoiled, bored, brat of a creature into deciding that if he could make nothing of himself where he was, he would go be a god to some other time and place.

Time and again he'd run into it, and ultimately it was something fairly simple to fix. Sure there was danger and risk, but once he'd figured out what or who had gone wrong, it was just a question of removing them from the equation and letting the poor abused society find its level again. Challenging, exhilarating, dangerous — and no messy clean-up needed, even if you did manage to survive.

But the Doctor suspected this case was different. Messy. Without a nice clear bad guy to simply attack. A slow confluence of human nature and poor choices, poor situations leading to poor results. Not the sort of thing he was supposed to go fixing, even if he could see how. He had made a career of interfering in order to remove a previous interference, to set right a balance. Not to protect humans from their own mistakes — wars, oppression, cruelty.

The thought taunted him as his hand moved to set the time gauge. He could back up if he wanted, get there before his own personal disaster struck. He knew better than to think doing so would save Rose or Jack, they were already destroyed. Changing the course of the society that had done it would not have them suddenly appearing beside him in the console room confused but unharmed, as so much pre-time-travel science fiction would have it. It made for a great ending, a way to cheat death for the sake of a story, but time simply didn't work that way.

If he somehow managed to back up and set the Humans and Scanta of this place on their way to the close, integrated society they would have in the future, the time line — and its changes — would simply ripple through this point as well. Rose and Jack would be no less gone, even if their deaths had never technically occurred. Their fates would exist only in his mind, the all-to-familiar paradox of dealing with losses that never technically happened. They would become ghosts, myths, lost whispers in the stream of time, just as Gallifrey had.

But they wouldn't suffer. His eyes closed reflexively as he remembered Rose crying, her screaming echoing down the hall. Suffering, and him without any way to save her. If he went earlier, and changed enough, that would never happen. Her torture would ring in his own ears forever, there was no way to change that, but he could at least know that by wiping out their time stream here that Rose would never have had to suffer it.

His hand hesitated over the setting, torn. Such large-scale changes were dangerous at best and disastrous at worst. He had no clear plan, no clear point to aim for, in either time or space, and it wouldn't bring either of them back to him. He remembered Rose, back what seemed like yesterday and eons ago at the same time, standing across the table from him in Downing Street and telling him to do what needed to be done. Knowing nothing of the plan, only that it would risk her, she still trusted him, even at that early stage, to do the right thing.

With a sigh, and a burning behind his eyes that he couldn't control, he knew what she would want. She had always trusted him over her own fear. _You would bollocks up whole civilization just to spare me a few hours of torture?_ It was as though he could hear her, in his mind, speaking directly to him. _Are you daft?_ _It's already happened, let it go._ And she was right, of course. It made no sense to wipe out the last days of her existence, just to erase her last bit of suffering. _But it's all I can do!_ He argued back at her. _When it happened, when I was there, I couldn't save you. Now I can!_

The voice in his head said nothing, but then again it didn't need to. He could almost feel the slightly frustrated patience radiating off of her, waiting for him to catch up to what her quick little ape mind had already grasped. He remembered long ago turning back over his shoulder to look at the London Eye, uncomprehending, once, twice, while she waited for his oh-so-superior mind to catch up.

He felt the same thing now. He hadn't been able to save her then, and he couldn't save her now. The burning behind his eyes started trailing hot tears down his cheek as he was forced to accept that there was nothing he could do. Not for either of them.

He spun the dial, aiming for the evening after he had left, dead center on the roof of the prison. Darkness was always useful for stealth and surprise. And he might not have a plan this time, but he would be armed. And that looked like the only way he'd be able to get any of his questions answered.

Besides, maybe he could get his jacket and sonic screwdriver back at least. It wasn't much, but it was a plan, he supposed.


	8. Chapter 8

Jack wasn't sure how long they had been sitting where they'd fallen, staring at the blank stretch of grass that looked like every other patch of grass on the hill, save for what was supposed to be there — and wasn't.

Rose had fallen asleep, exhausted, against him. He knew he needed to get them moving, undercover. Water, shelter, food. He could check off the lists of priorities and techniques for surviving finding yourself suddenly stranded in a primitive time. Basic, first-year stuff.

And yet he couldn't bring himself to move. The trees behind them sheltered them from the evening breezes that stirred their leaves. It was cool, but not cold yet. They could be spotted, captured at any moment, but only if they were being hunted. Only if the cow, still grazing out in the field across the road was a spy for the guards. More likely they were thought both dead, him at his oh-so-public execution, and Rose in the explosion that had claimed the Doctor.

Jack shuddered at that, still unable to quite get his mind around the thought of the Doctor being gone. Snuffed right out. Made into a myth, an unreality, like the rest of his world. Sure he and Rose remembered, and always would. But how long would they live? Maybe a hundred years, even in the best of circumstances, which these most certainly weren't? Then what?

A sharp, irrational stab of betrayal made him realize he'd been counting on the reverse. So many cultures believed a person's spirit existed as long as there was someone alive to remember them. He'd always resonated to that idea — all the more reason those two missing years in his own memories enraged him so. The Doctor had been that for his people, for his world, and belatedly Jack realized that he'd been counting on the Doctor to do the same for him, and for Rose.

They had nowhere near his life span to begin with, let alone his unfailing ability to get out of deadly peril at the last possible instant. Despite the life they all lived — or perhaps because of it — Jack had never doubted that the Doctor would outlive them both. Probably by centuries. That he and Rose would share a tiny piece of immortality buried deep in the Doctor's hearts.

But this... this was unthinkable. Had been unthinkable.

Jack tried not to think that the Doctor was out there, somewhere, somewhen, now still. Dancing through time the way he did, he could have visited this place long after he'd died here, all unknowing. In fact Jack was sure he had, after all, the flourosilk Rose would wear to a particular Mardi Gras he remembered a thousand years from now on the other side of the galaxy had surely come from here.

This place became a great center of trade and commerce one day. The Doctor was sure to stop by... in a few hundred years. Even if he appeared before Jack and Rose died of disease, accident, or old age, there was no reason to think their paths would cross. It's not as if he'd even be looking for them. _He wouldn't even know us yet._ And that thought somehow sank even more heavily.

There was some nine hundred years of the Doctor still out there, roaming about time and space, helping the innocent, taking on the bad guys, all big smiles and cocky attitude. Another of the paradoxes of time, especially for someone so obviously well-traveled in it. The Doctor would always be there, in the past, in the future, on another world right this minute.

Yet _their_ Doctor was gone forever. Taking time as a whole he was practically everywhere, but he would never be here. He would never outlive his little ape lovers, never carry their memories with him past the point where their own bodies gave out....

Jack realized he was drifting, babbling inside his own head and barely making sense anymore. He felt Rose shiver against his side and knew he had to do something. Another barn or shed would give them ample shelter for the night once more. Easy enough to hide out here in the fields and farms. They could work on what happened next tomorrow, when they were both feeling better.

After all, there was nothing to say they had to stay local, and every reason not to. They could travel to another part of the country, hell, maybe all the way across the continent if that was the only range of travel they had left. But tonight.... Jack slowly moved a cold-stiffened arm, brushing the hair away from Rose's face, preparing to wake her up so they could move.

For a split second the heat he felt in her face was a welcome relief to his chilled fingers, but then his mind and training kicked in. Fever. He reached to lift her arm, just enough to see the burns and she roused slightly, whimpering in pain. Even in the dim light of the rising moon he could see angry red tendrils of infection running under her skin, radiating out from the open wounds.

Jack fought down panic. He'd been counting on the TARDIS and its advanced equipment to make quick work of both their injuries, and had given them little thought beyond what was needed to get them here safely. But no TARDIS meant they were on their own, with no technology, no medical aid, in a time and place where an infection like the one he was looking at could easily mean the loss of a limb or death.

They needed medical help, whatever this time could offer, and to hell with the risks of being recognized and recaptured. Without more than he could do, Rose would almost certainly die. He would lose her too, all over again, slowly and painfully. If he let himself acknowledge the steady throbbing ache in the back of his own neck, he realized he probably wasn't all that much better off himself.

But if Rose died too, if he were truly left here alone, he didn't much care if they did execute him again.

Stumbling to his feet, cold and still protesting muscles fighting him all the way, Jack suddenly feared that he had waited too long. There was a dizzying, whooshing sound in his ears as he stooped down to try to pick up Rose, and his first thought was that he himself was far worse off than he had thought, and that they'd most likely die here together, undiscovered, possibly that very night.

His second thought was that he _recognized_ that whooshing sound. And he might indeed be already delirious, but it wasn't the sound of the blood rushing in his ears. Seeing the TARDIS key in Rose's limp hand he snatched it up, feeling it warm from the heat of her fevered hand, of course. But the warmth increased, instead of dying away as he held it on his own palm, open to the chill night air.

Disbelieving anything and everything at this point, Jack spun around, looking back at the patch of grass he'd been staring at hopelessly for what had probably been hours.

~~~~~~~~~

As the TARDIS landed, the Doctor was busy grabbing a weapon. He settled on a large, Nylosin rifle. It wasn't by any means the most destructive or powerful thing he could find, even on short notice, but it was definitely the most impressive looking. After all, he insisted to himself — squashing down the raw, angry, bleeding parts of him that screamed for revenge — he hoped he wouldn't actually be using it.

And yet he stuck a tiny sonic disruptor in a back pocket as well. Not as handy as the lost screwdriver, but more likely to be overlooked should he be captured, and much more useful in getting out of a suddenly sticky situation.

A part of him wondered at that choice, and chalked it up to habit, nine hundred years of reflex. After all, he had no particular desire to survive this adventure. There was nothing waiting for him but an empty, grieving TARDIS if he did.

Striding straight for the door once they'd landed, he flung it open... and stopped dead.

No city, no rooftop, no guards. Just an open field and a familiar-looking, slightly startled cow staring at him from across the road. The Doctor cursed under his breath. Of all the times for the TARDIS to get creative in her landings; She'd dropped him right back where they had landed that fateful morning.

_Well, never mind_, he thought. He shouldn't be surprised to realize she was a bit off her game too. After all, he knew the way, and a good walk wouldn't hurt him. It did make the question of how to get back into the prison a little more difficult. But maybe he'd have a better chance to survey the place before—

His thoughts broke off cold as he heard a voice coming from his right. It was distant, weary, cracking, but he knew it — would know it — anywhere from the simple two syllables of his own name. "_Doctor?_"

It was Jack. Jack who was dead. He forcibly crushed the joy in his hearts from the sound and roundly cursed the TARDIS and her 'creative' landings. She had not only gone back to their original spot, but had apparently backed up in time as well. If he didn't turn on his heel and leave _now_, he could destroy everything here. Because he knew that if he saw that face, touched that body, warm and alive, he would never be able to leave. Not until the Reapers tore them both apart.

Turning away, without even looking up, running away from the desperate pleading in that voice was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. But in the few split-seconds it took to force himself through that pain, another part of him was objecting, arguing against his emotional death-grip on himself with simple logic. Facts. They had landed in the early morning. Jack had been dead by noon. How then could he be hearing that soul-tearing voice in what was clearly the middle of the night?

But if he hadn't backed up over his own time line, what had he done?

~~~~~~~~~

Seeing the faint outline of the TARDIS appearing, right where it had been that morning, left Jack giddy with relief. Either he was delirious already, and there was nothing more to be done, or somehow the TARDIS had returned for them. With her, there was at least hope — safety, medical facilities, food, protection. Even if he never did figure out how to fly her on his own, he and Rose at least wouldn't die together of infection and exposure overnight.

Taking advantage of the rush of adrenaline, he grabbed the key, blessedly warm to his touch, tightly in one hand and managed to scoop Rose up into his arms. She whimpered as the move jogged her sore arm, but he just laughed, and placed a kiss on her burning brow. "It's all right Rose. She's back, and I'm going to get you all fixed up. We're gonna be o.k."

Jack smiled to see the door swing open even as he took his first step down the slope. _Home._ It had been a long time since he'd had a place that meant that to him, but here she was, even without the Doctor, back to save them, to protect them—

It was when he saw the oh-so-familiar form step out of the door, pausing just outside, back lit by the interior of the TARDIS, that his brain went blank in confusion. Still, he couldn't help the reflexive cry that escaped his lips. "Doctor?"

He saw the figure freeze, but not look up, only then noticing the pulse rifle ready in his hands. Jack felt an icy wash over his heart. Not _their_ Doctor. Definitely not their Doctor. Not the one that was lying in a pile of charred and burned bones in the blown-out guard station.

Jack kept moving, though, unable to pass up any chance at rescue. _One of the other times he visited, then_, Jack thought, unable to come up with a reason why the Doctor would be here and now, let alone have risked dropping them only a day earlier than one of his previous visits on a lark yesterday morning.

But they'd not been intending to come here, at least not now. They'd landed a full five hundred years off, the Doctor had said. Perhaps the TARDIS had been confused, doubling back on an earlier stop by mistake. Had it only been an accidental shift that had kept them from running into each other in the first place?

The Doctor had recognized where and when they had landed, perhaps because he had been there before. Was he coming now to fix whatever had gone so wrong here? Jack almost choked on the irony — that the Doctor should have been here to repair things only a day too late to keep from eventually being killed by them anyway.

Through all the thoughts whirling around his brain, though, Jack's stumbling progress towards the haven of the TARDIS never halted. Even if this wasn't their Doctor, even if — and Jack tried to ignore the way his heart tore at the thought — this Doctor didn't know the two of them from any other stupid little apes this planet had ever produced, he would help. He would _have_ to.

They couldn't tell a past version what had happened here, so better to go with a simpler, more distancing lie. He was — _they were_ — Time Agents on a mission gone wrong, trapped in this place with no way off. With any luck, the Doctor would give them basic medical care and a ride off this hellhole and to some place where they could try to start fresh.

Even without knowing them, much less loving them, yet, Jack couldn't imagine the Doctor turning away from Rose. Not when she was clearly this badly off.

The problem would be not letting on how much they felt. Rose was unconscious, and with any luck could remain so until they were dropped off elsewhere and when. But how was he supposed to talk to this man he loved like he'd never loved in his life, this oblivious image of his dead love, and not give it all away? Not grab him tight and bury him in kisses. Not give in to the desperate need to feel two heartbeats beneath warm, living skin pressed against his own?

The pain of those thoughts was pushed straight out of his mind by pure terror as he saw the Doctor turn, moving back into the TARDIS. Automatically Jack calculated how many seconds it would take him to reach the door, to get the key in if it had closed behind him, how long he might have if the unthinkable happened and this last-second reprieve disappeared like the fevered mirage he was already fearing it was.

_Not enough. Not enough time._ The words pounded through his head with every labored beat of his heart. The Doctor had paused in the doorway and Jack kept moving, begging with his mind, with breath he didn't have to spare, that the Time Lord would hesitate, just for a few more moments. Just a few more, he reasoned, and they could be there, a few moments would make all the difference.

So focused was he on the door that Jack didn't properly register the shift underfoot, the turn of his ankle. He was falling forward, trying to shield Rose rather than land on her, before he realized what had even happened. They went down in a crashing heap and Rose cried out again in incoherent pain. And all Jack could think was that he'd failed. He'd let Rose down and quite possibly killed them both. And with his breath entirely knocked out of him by the fall, he didn't even have the ability to shout again, to try to catch the Doctor's attention, to beg treatment at least for Rose....

Jack's head spun as all the bittersweet hope of an instant was wiped out the next, and he couldn't help the tears burning down his cheeks at the bitter irony of it all.


	9. Chapter 9

The Doctor stood there, caught in the doorway, knowing he had to make a decision fast, but unable to do it. His senses were trying to tell him that he'd arrived just when he'd intended, even if it looked like the TARDIS had taken a bit of liberty with the planned location. But his Jack was dead. Quite publicly so, he reminded himself, forcing himself to watch that moment in the square over again in his head. But his hearts insisted they knew that voice, that nowhere in time or space could they mistake it for any other.

What could have happened? And, more to the point, what the hell did he do now?

The sound of bodies falling, Rose's cry of pain — just as indelibly printed on his mind — made the decision for him. He responded on instinct, turning around again and seeing the two of them, Jack and Rose, tumbled into the grass not five meters away. He managed to stop himself halfway, pausing, his desperate desire to clutch them both to his chest without delay warring with his critical need to know just who and where and when they were, before he destroyed them all.

Rose lay on the ground, apparently unconscious — testing his resolve more than he thought he'd be able to bear. Jack, however was awake, chest heaving and clearly winded, with one hand on his solar plexus and the other on his ankle. Seeing him approach, Jack tried to get up, and collapsed again, the ankle apparently damaged too badly to support him.

Teeth biting through his lip, the taste of his own blood in his mouth as he tried to maintain his self-control, his distance, the Doctor stood there, trying not to let the roiling wave of his own feelings show in his eyes.

"My name is Jack Harkness," Jack gasped out, clearly as soon as he was able to get breath to do so. "This is Rose Tyler. We're Time Agents... stranded here." The voice was getting stronger and more desperate at the same time. "Please. Please help us? She's hurt."

"You knew my name." It was all he could think to say. How at any point in time could Jack and Rose have already met and yet not know _him?_ How could Rose be a Time Agent? Or even posing as one? None of this made any sense, so the Doctor found himself clinging to the one thing that did, the one thing that gave the lie to the story this Jack, whoever and whenever he was, was trying to tell him. "You called me by name."

Despite the easy skill at prevarication he knew Jack to have, the Doctor could see the thoughts run over his face almost as though he had voiced them aloud. Jack was startled, confused, and then remembered that first involuntary cry. Apparently surprised it had been heard, he was now left struggling to explain that one careless word away.

They were clearly in need of medical aid, and he waited a moment, fascinated, for Jack to realize that he need simply have been calling for generic help. For his face to close over with that oh-so-sincere charm and the easy lie. But the moment never came. Jack might be conscious, but he clearly wasn't doing all that well either, because the Doctor could see the look of defeat settle over his face.

"Yes, we know you," he admitted. "One day you'll know us too, Doctor. I'll try to explain later and avoid all the paradoxes and... just _please_ help her now?" He gestured to the still and unmoving form of Rose in front of him. "She's dying and there's nothing I can do."

He didn't know if it was the utter despair in Jack's voice, or the thought of Rose — someone's Rose, even if not his — lying there dying in front of him all over again, but the Doctor couldn't take any more. _Save them now and damn the consequences_, he spit at the warning voices in his head as he leaned forward to scoop up Rose — warm, too warm, but alive in his arms one more time — and to offer a brace for Jack to climb up — the touch of him again bringing back so many memories — and a shoulder for him to hobble against.

After a few slow steps, Jack shook his head, letting go of the Doctor's shoulder and carefully managing to balance in place on one foot and a grimace of pain. "Take her in, Doc. I'm just slowing you down. Make sure she's o.k."

He turned and took a quick step, arriving back just in time to keep Jack from falling over again. "Nonsense, she'll be fine, Jack. Her fever's not that high. I can take care of you both." Jack was clearly reluctant to accept this, but seeing as the Doctor just as clearly was insisting on waiting for him anyway, he nodded, braced a hand on the Doctor's shoulder and hobbled gamely on.

All the while probably doing more damage than necessary to that ankle for the sake of speed, the Doctor cursed under his breath. Not that he'd expect any less of Jack.

They made it in the door and Jack's sigh of relief was almost deafening to the Doctor's over-stressed senses. Grabbing quickly to the railing, Jack let go of his shoulder. "Go, take care of her. I'm coming."

This time the Doctor took him up on his offer, striding quickly across the control room and into the medical bay that appeared just past it. He gave the TARDIS a mental thanks, as he laid Rose on the table, one ear tuned to the sound of Jack clumping his way from railing to railing as fast as he could behind them.

He looked at Rose — and squashed down _hard_ on his instinctive response to pull her close, to bury his face in the loose and tangled gold of her hair. Scanning her quickly he felt the tightness in his chest ease some. He'd been right: The start of a major opportunistic infection and utter exhaustion, nothing more serious. Nothing he couldn't mend for her easily. _I can save you now._

The thought sprung unbidden to his brain, and he dashed it away as Jack stumbled in the doorway behind him and collapsed on a stool. "Burns," he gasped out, "on her arm. Infected."

"I can see that," the Doctor said, as he moved to lift the hideously red and swollen arm, from which some crude attempt at a bandage had already largely fallen away. Rose cried out again in pain. Reaching instantly for an injector, he pressed it against her neck, watching as her expression softened and relaxed completely.

One look at the burns, careful and deliberate, had him looking at Jack with a raised eyebrow, but the Doctor didn't wait for a response to his unspoken question before grabbing a disinfector to clean the wounds, and a dermal regenerator to begin healing the damage.

The smaller two burns were easy enough. Give them an hour, make another pass, and she'd not even have a scar. The third wound was deeper, though, and larger, burning through multiple layers of skin and nerve. For all the pain Rose had obviously been feeling, the destroyed nerves under the most charred portion meant she wasn't even capable of feeling half the damage that had been done.

He cleaned that wound, and made a first pass at healing it with the dermal regenerator. That one would take a bit of time and several treatments, but it should be fixable as well. With a final injection of simple antibiotics and a cuff to monitor her temperature and vital signs, the Doctor forced himself to turn away from Rose for a moment and face Jack, still unsure of what was going on or what he should say.

~~~~~~~~~

Jack was in little better shape himself, although the sight of Rose's pain ebbing away into sleep, her wounds being treated, and her infection being stabilized gave him a sense of relief so great it pretty much drove all other thoughts from his head. _She's safe. She's going to live. I haven't lost her too._

Then he found himself facing the lover he _had_ lost and he had no clue what to say.

"All right now," the Doctor said, turning to him and pinning him with a gaze Jack was sure could see right through him. "She's stable, she's healing, and she's going to be fine. You," he glanced Jack up and down, and Jack tried not to feel a thoroughly inappropriate rush of heat from that gaze, "look like you can wait a few minutes."

Jack managed a nod, as the Doctor took a step backwards, and folded his arms over his chest. "Now, what exactly is going on here?" Jack blanked, transfixed by those eyes, every attempt at a lie slipping away from him and the truth far too dangerous to risk telling.

A tiny part of him, despite the pain from his neck and ankle, his utter exhaustion, the potential temporal paradoxes they risked from even being here in the presence of an earlier, unknowing version of the Doctor — a part of Jack just wanted him one last time. Wanted to dig out that charm he'd polished so well, lay it on the man using every weakness and soft spot he knew from their future together, and find a way to seduce him all over again. No words, no explanations, no heart-ripping sense of loss from looking into beautiful eyes that were already nothing but dead ash in his world, in his timeline.

And at the same time, Jack knew all too well that it would never work. The Doctor wasn't one to give in, to make himself vulnerable so fast. Especially not to two injured strangers, clearly on the run, who had shown up on his doorstep with unusual injuries and dubious and conflicting stories.

"You said something about paradoxes, Jack." The voice broke into his reverie. "And you clearly know me, which shouldn't be possible. You two together," he gestured at Rose, blissfully oblivious on the table, "shouldn't be possible either. Just what is going on?"

Jack stumbled over the events of the past day or so in his mind, trying to separate out those he could disclose from those he couldn't. All right, the Doctor clearly already knew _a_ Jack and Rose, who he'd undoubtedly recognize when he ran into them again at a later date. _Was_ that why he landed the TARDIS in a doomed Chula ship long enough to save me from my own stupidity? Jack wondered, mind slipping off track for a moment. _Doesn't matter, not now._

And the Doctor now knew that Jack and Rose would end up stranded together, injured, on this planet. That alone might affect the Doctor's future decision to bring them here, but it was too late for Jack to worry about that now. The Doctor should know as little as possible of what happened, so as not to disrupt things. _Most of all I can't tell him that he dies here. That we're stranded here because he's gone. Forever._

Jack choked a little on the thought and managed to turn it into a probably unconvincing cough, his hand reflexively moving to cover the back of his neck as the motion jarred his own open wound. Suddenly convinced he could feel something moving in there, he snatched his hand away just as quickly, trying _very_ hard not to think about it and raising a look of concern on the Doctor's face. Good thing he'd cleaned it up as best as they could. That was going to be an interesting injury to avoid explaining.

"We know you, Doctor," he started, realizing he was going to have to start somewhere and just praying he could find some way out. "Or we will know you, in your future." Again that much he'd already let slip. "Some time... after we met you... Rose and I ended up stranded here." He couldn't make it sound like their Doctor was coming back for them, or why would they want a lift? "Uh, we'd gotten separated from you by then... lost contact." _And wasn't death, after all, the ultimate loss of contact?_ _The more truth you could work into a lie, the stronger it held._

Jack looked up at that point, hoping it would be enough. "I can't say more, Doc, you know better than anyone that I shouldn't be telling you anything about your future." He pleaded with his eyes, and saw in the Doctor's stance that he had started to cave. "Just get us to someplace where we can get our own transport, make some connections, and...," he had to swallow hard,"... and leave us there. Then forget us, forget all of this. Forget you even met us here."


	10. Chapter 10

The plea in Jack's eyes to leave it alone was almost enough to sway him, against all sense and burning curiosity. But too much of him objected, not only a visceral reaction to the thought of being forced to leave them somewhere and walk away forever, but the logical, rational part of his brain that insisted that the more Jack tried to explain, the less sense he was making.

The Doctor pulled up another stool for himself and sat down facing Jack, feeling like he was playing a game of minds, of wills, of judicious and careful negotiation with this man whom he wanted more than anything to grab and shag senseless against the nearest available surface.

Forcing himself to concentrate, he looked for clues. He looked the same, Jack did. Rose too for that matter. More weary, yes, but no older than the ones he had lost. _Of course they're no older, you bloody git. They're_ dead_. They never will be any older than they were the day you brought them here._ Jack had missing time from his memories, two years worth at last report. Could that be what this was? The Doctor wondered. It would explain how this Jack knew him, and yet _his_ Jack had given no sign of being anything other than an amused and annoying stranger when they'd met in World War II London.

But how did Rose fit into that? He turned to her, watching her breathe, just for a moment watching her live — unconscious and oblivious to his presence. "You said 'we know you'," the Doctor repeated, turning back to Jack and watching the not-so-convincing-any-more con-artist try to anticipate where this thread was leading. "You, I could see," he conceded, although it was something of a stretch, and a tangle still that made no particular sense. "I can make that work, but her?" He shook his head and watched as Jack so-transparently cursed inwardly for a single word slip of the tongue.

"And don't try to pretend that's not what you said or what you meant, Jack," he warned as the younger man moved to open his mouth. "It doesn't work with Rose, you see." He sighed, suddenly feeling all nine hundred of his years. "I could count on the fingers of one hand the times she wasn't right here with me between the time I first picked her up in London and the..." _the day she died._ He caught himself. _Careful, careful, Doctor. The first and most easily broken rule of avoiding time paradoxes — a lesson even the Time Agents learned on Day 1, he suspected — never, ever let someone know when or where they are going to die._

"And the last time I saw her," he finished smoothly without too much of a tell-tale gap. By the wide-eyed look on Jack's face, though, he had revealed far more than he ever meant to. Scanning back, sifting through his own words, he found nothing obvious. _There was no need to bring up London, I suppose, but I can't see how that would matter_—

"You _know_ us?" Jack's expression, still eerily guileless and open as a child's, was a mixture of wonder and confusion. "Rose and me, you already know us?"

_Of course I know you, the Doctor wanted to shout. I know you still talk big and flirt with anything that moves, but since that Mardi Gras — the one where everything changed — you've never once made a move on anyone but me or Rose. I know the Time Agency betrayed you and stole two years of your life away. I know you could charm the stars right out of the sky, and wouldn't knowingly hurt a soul to do so. I know the look on your face when you come, the size and shape of the mole behind your right hip, and the place just behind your left ear where a simple lick from the right tongue can get you hard as a rock in an instant._

But he managed to constrain himself to, "Yes, Jack, I know both you and Rose quite well." _Or I did until you died yesterday._

Now it was Jack that looked utterly lost... until a desperate light came into his eyes. "Where's your screwdriver, Doc? Your jacket?"

The Doctor stared, thrown by Jack's change of demeanor, his hopeful sense of desperation, as though the secrets of the universe were riding on his answer to this question.

"That stupid, sonic-ed-up screwdriver of yours." Jack insisted, ignoring the Doctor's reflexive sound of protest. "Where is it?"

_Back with the guards who turned you and Rose to ashes around me. And I'm still hoping they choke and die on it._ "I don't have it with me," the Doctor ventured hesitantly.

~~~~~~~~~

Jack's head was dizzy with exhaustion and playing this tangled game and he decided to go for broke, on the off chance that the tiny voice of hope he was keeping under as much control as he could was actually _right_. That if he could have thought Rose dead and been so beautifully wrong....

"It's still back in the cell block, isn't it?"

_Nicely done_, he heard the properly-trained Time Agent in the back of his head approve. A phrase that, of itself and without context meant next to nothing... but that from the look of shock on the Doctor's face really could mean everything after all.

"When was the last time you saw me?" Jack asked quickly, wanting to cheer at the quickly, but barely concealed look of pain that brought out on the Doctor's face. _It was true_ Jack wanted to crow, feeling both overjoyed and incredibly slow on the uptake at the same time. After all, if he himself had managed to cheat death in front of a crowd of witnesses, _in front of their very eyes_, why had he accepted circumstantial evidence for Rose _or_ the Doctor's deaths?

"You can't tell me, can you?" he said, not waiting for the Doctor to come up with some evasive answer, feeling the smile on his own face growing. "You can't tell me because it was when I _died_, right?" The utter shock and pain on the Doctor's face made Jack want to start laughing, dancing, reaching out to the man in front of him, _oh, gods, the love I thought I'd lost forever._

Jack kept going, risking all sorts of disaster and misery if he were wrong, but by now absolutely convinced that he was right. "It was when you saw me executed yesterday morning by the guard commander with five Scanta on that sick merry-go-round they have out in the public square, right? After the explosion in the tavern. You and Rose, they made you watch it all. _Tell_ me I'm wrong!" he insisted.

The Doctor was just shaking his head, confused, horrified, and yet somehow hopeful all at once. Jack moved to stand up, and yelped as the pain shot through his probably-broken ankle. Instead he ended up spun about on the stool, exposing the back of his neck and the wound he didn't want to feel, much less look at, to the Doctor's gaze. He heard the Doctor jump to his feet behind him, fingers checking the cut, and Jack managed to pull away long enough to turn back around and face him, somehow still marveling that those eyes — which he'd seen holding so much pain, could still hold so much hope.

"They missed, Doc," he whispered, only inches away from the Doctor's face now. "They planned for Scanta, not humans when they built that thing." He looked into the Doctor's eyes, actively feeding the flame of hope he found there. "Hurt like hell and knocked me for a loop, but it didn't hit anything vital." He was desperate to explain, to make the Doctor believe in as few words as he could, to let him believe as quickly as possible. "All I had to do was play dead until sundown when they came for the bodies." He smiled, watching the Doctor's lips start to curve up to match.

"_I'm still alive._"

They were the last words he managed, before his mouth was buried under the Doctor's, locked in a desperate, bruising kiss, eagerly giving back everything he was given. The Doctor's hands skated carefully around the cut on his neck, clutching the sides of his head like it might evaporate if he didn't. For his part, Jack reached far enough forward to wrap his arms around the Doctor's chest, pulling them as close as he could manage.

Just before Jack passed out happily from lack of oxygen, the Doctor pulled back, just far enough to breathe, to look at each other. Their foreheads resting against each other as they fought to catch their breath.

"It's really you," the Doctor whispered, as though still unsure, still needing to be reassured, promised that this was true.

Jack nodded, feeling like he could use some reassurance himself. "I couldn't do anything that would give me away," he found himself needing desperately to explain the pain he'd put them through, even though the Doctor was nodding and shushing him and, oh gods, holding him so close. "I could hear Rose kneeling there, crying, and it nearly broke my heart, I'm so sorry...."

Jack trailed off as the Doctor stiffened and went very still in his grasp. Looking up, Jack could see him looking, almost fearfully at Rose's peacefully sleeping form. "Roek said she was dead."

"What?" Jack asked carefully, suddenly feeling like the man in his arms might shatter with the wrong word.

"The Scanta that rescued me, that broke me out of the prison," the Doctor clarified, turning slowly to look at Rose with a combination of wonder and horror Jack didn't understand. "They tortured her, you know," the Doctor said in a whisper. "For hours. I was gagged and tied up just down the hall. I could hear her scream, and there was nothing I could do."

Jack's stomach suddenly sunk like a rock and he had to fight back nausea at remembering what had been done to Rose, their precious Rose. But the thought of having had to listen to it happen, helpless to stop it....

"Then, suddenly, it stopped." The Doctor didn't have to add that that had been even worse than the screaming. Jack could barely imagine the pure hell it must have been.

"When Roek came for me in the morning she said Rose was dead." A hollow, bitter laugh. "I said I wouldn't leave without Rose, and so she told me Rose had died in the night, that the torturers had been careless," the Doctor's voice broke and Jack just held tighter to him as he choked on unshed tears.

"She didn't die, Doctor," Jack reassured him. "The Scanta lied to you. She didn't die either. I found her in the cellblock this morning."

"But they still tortured her." Jack looked up and the Doctor's eyes were squeezed shut in pain. "I heard the men, I heard her screams... and I couldn't do anything for her."

Jack realized that the Doctor could only be thinking the worst, as he had himself at first. A terrible imagination and an all-too-solid familiarity with the cruelty humans could and did inflict on each other giving horrible shape to whatever sounds he'd been able to hear.

"No," Jack insisted, turning the Doctor's face back towards him forcibly and holding him there until he opened his eyes again. "_No._"

That was the pain Jack had seen too often, deep in those eyes, the pain he and Rose had been able to make go away, at least for a time. "I was there, Jack. I heard them."

Jack shook his head, desperate to clarify. "Yes, they tortured her," Jack admitted, squeezing gently until the Doctor's eyes re-opened onto his. "They scared her half to death and gave her those burns you already saw. _But that's all._"

The Doctor frowned, again, too afraid to hope he was hearing truth, but Jack knew he needed to know this, needed one more layer of guilt and pain off of his already over-weighted soul. "I swear," Jack said, looking dead into the Doctor's eyes, willing him to believe the truth over the demons conjured by his own imagination. "I'm not lying to you and she wasn't lying to me."

A flicker of fragile trust. "The guards wanted her, sure, but she stood up to them. Scared out of her mind she stood up to them and told them that she had some kind of venereal disease from sleeping around with her little Scanta friends, something that would make their dicks shrivel and fall off if they so much as touched her." He was grinning ear to ear now, so damned proud of her he couldn't keep it in. "And she made them believe it!"

The Doctor broke out laughing, only an edge of hysteria to his tone. "Oh, Rose," he smiled, reaching over to trace the side of her face, clearing her tangled hair out of the way.

"She's one tough young woman, Doc," Jack agreed, leaning over to touch her hair as well. "She said they kept her strapped to that damned board all night, but that the guards wouldn't come anywhere near her." He sobered a bit, looking across at her far arm, propped up carefully now, but still showing the signs of damage. "They sent in their master torturer then, she said, with two of his apprentices." His teeth set at the thought. "I'm assuming the small burns were theirs...."

"And the big one was the master showing them how it ought to be done," the Doctor concluded. "That's what I heard, then," he stroked a hand down the side of her face once more. "She must have passed out from the pain."

Jack nodded, trying again not to think about it too much. "But that's it, I swear," he repeated, not sure whether he was reassuring the Doctor or himself anymore. "Sore wrists where they kept her hanging, a couple of scratches, probably from the explosion afterward, and the burns—"

"Explosion?" the Doctor looked up at him, worry in his eyes again. "What explosion?"

Jack swallowed hard at the memory and hitched his stool around as best he could so as to include all three of them in the same comforting circle of touch. He looked up at the Doctor solemnly. "The explosion that killed _you._"


	11. Chapter 11

The Doctor did a double-take at that, almost asking "What?" reflexively. But taking a good look at Jack's eyes, the Doctor didn't force him to repeat it. "I wasn't in any explosion," he said clearly. _And I sure wouldn't have come out looking like this if I had,_ he added mentally before realizing that obviously neither of them knew about that little Time Lord trick for cheating death. Hardly the time to bring it up now, either. "Not after that first one at the bar, I mean," he amended.

Jack nodded, slowly, the young man's arm tightening where it gripped around his waist. "But your screwdriver and jacket were."

"Oh," the Doctor replied uncertain what else to say. After all, he'd been hoping something like that would happen, even though Jack's next words disabused him of the notion of any kind of sonic revenge.

"When I got free from the body cart," a grimace flickered across Jack's face, "I worked my way around to the prison. I had heard the commander telling them to lock you two up, and I figured I could come racing to the rescue."

Jack shrugged off a wry grin. "But no sooner had I gotten inside than I heard the explosion." His gaze fell. "At first I figured you'd beaten me to the punch and found a way to break yourselves out, but then they started finding the bodies.

"Another terrorist attack, this time right underneath the guard station. The guards were reporting that only you and Rose were in that section, and that you had been taken for interrogation." Jack paused, gathering himself against the images his memory played before him again. "Right in the center of the guard room there was a tangle of bodies. They were all burned so badly... together. No way to tell how even many there were for sure, let alone identify anyone.

"All I could see for sure was that damned sonic screwdriver of yours in pieces, and scraps of charred black leather." Jack's voice broke at the last bit, and the Doctor found himself stroking reassuringly up and down the man's back. "I assumed Rose was with you and...." _Bits of blond hair. Must have been a guard._ Jack turned, burying himself in the Doctor's chest, letting the tears come. "I thought I'd taken too long. Only minutes too long, and I'd lost you both...."

"Shhhh," the Doctor soothed, holding Jack tight as he shuddered against him. It seemed it was his turn to point out the reassuringly obvious. "We're alive. Rose is alive, I'm alive... and you're alive," he said, tipping Jack's face up to meet his eyes. "Somehow, we all made it," he smiled, feeling the grin threaten to take over his face and seeing Jack's amusement as he couldn't help but return it. "I'm deathly afraid it's all a dream, but if it is, I don't want to wake up."

Jack swallowed hard and reached up for him, "I'll show you dream—"

Luckily the Doctor was close enough to catch Jack as he forgot his own injuries again and almost landed on the floor. Swinging the younger man deftly around, one arm solidly under his shoulder, the Doctor steered him over at a slow hobble to the other table in the room.

"Now I think it's more than time to take care of you, Jack. Lie down and let me get a look at your neck." As Jack complied, the Doctor grabbed a few of the tools he'd used on Rose earlier. "Now this is going to hurt, a lot," he warned almost cheerfully, "so if you want me to put you under—"

"No," Jack insisted. "I can take it. And I'm not missing one more second of having you two back and alive— Rose!"

Jack broke off so suddenly, that the Doctor spun around, expecting to find some drastic change in her condition. Finding none he looked back to see Jack start to shake his head, but then wince and halt the motion. "No, I didn't mean to scare you. It's just that she doesn't know."

The Doctor quirked an eyebrow, in question.

"That you're alive," Jack clarified. "I found her just by chance in the hallway after the explosion, sobbing her eyes out, thinking she'd lost us both."

The Doctor's heart sank at that image and he barely stopped himself from reaching for an injection that would wake her up almost instantly. What Rose needed more than anything now was rest, and she was peacefully asleep. And the Doctor damned well intended to be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes.

"I got her out of there and we had to hide out most of the day in a barn," Jack continued his explanation as the Doctor took a deep breath and started working on his neck. "Oh, and by the way, Doc, just how bad is it? And leave out the part about the maggots, O.K.?" Jack added, wincing.

"These maggots, like the ones native to Earth, only eat dead flesh, so they've actually done a pretty decent job cleaning up the wound," the Doctor informed Jack all too cheerfully.

"I said—"

"I heard you," the Doctor informed him primly, removing the maggots and disinfecting the cut. "And when you stop calling me 'Doc', I might actually even start listening to you."

With his head bent the way it was, Jack choked slightly on a laugh. The Doctor couldn't help grinning himself. It was the first normal exchange they'd had in far too long. "It cut right through to the bone," he continued, making no comment as the muscles in Jack's back bunched against the pain he was causing.

That involuntary response made it clear that there would be no lasting nerve damage once he got the wound to heal properly, so the Doctor felt comfortable passing a local pain inhibitor field over the site.

"Uh, Doc-tor?" Jack corrected himself.

"The nerves are fine, Jack, so I numbed it a bit. Hope you don't mind," he added as an afterthought.

"No, no. Not at all," Jack assured him. "I'm not into pain. You know me, I'm all about the pleasure," Jack added, the smirk evident in his voice, even lying flat on his face as he was.

"I do seem to recall something about that," the Doctor replied, indulging himself in letting his hand run caressingly all the way down Jack's back, ending with a squeeze to the bum that earned him a twitch and a yelp from his patient.

"Hey, Doctor!" Jack protested, his voice amused, and his hips squirming slightly on the exam table. "No fair. You've got me at something of a disadvantage here!"

"Indeed I do," the Doctor said, planting a soft kiss right behind Jack's left ear.

That definitely caused some more squirming, before the Doctor turned back to his duties. "As I was saying," and he felt the light, happy air of the last few moments drain out of him as he took a good look at the damage, "the blade cut right through to the bone. Chipped the vertebra a little, even. A few millimeters up or down and...."

The Doctor felt Jack's hand reach out to grasp his leg, admittedly pretty much the only part of him the man could easily reach from his current position. "But it didn't," Jack said decisively. "The stupid bastards missed. Right?" And the Doctor knew the reassurance was for his sake and not for Jack's.

"Right," he repeated, squeezing Jack's hand before he it let go. Trying to relax again, and let his voice show it, he continued, "Nice, clean, almost surgical cut. It's just been open to the elements too long." He turned to a cabinet for a slightly heavier-duty instrument designed to mend bone. It didn't get all that much use, and it had a tendency to make a nasty whining noise.

Jack flinched visibly when he turned it on. "Uh, you _are_ actually a doctor, right, Doctor?" Jack's voice wavered a bit as the sound came closer. "I mean, as in medical training and all?"

The Doctor chuckled, "Among other things, yes, Jack. Stop worrying. There's a loose bit in the housing I never got around to fixing, but it works just fine. Just hold very still for a minute...."

As he tipped it over Jack's neck the whine rose sharply in pitch and volume, making even the Doctor wince. But to Jack's credit, for all the muscles tensing uncomfortably along his neck and shoulders, he stayed perfectly still while the chip was repaired.

His relief when the regenerator was switched off, however, was palpable.

"All right, then," the Doctor kept up his chatter, figuring Jack would rather know than lie there in silence. "Now to work a bit on the muscle and nerves— Ooops! Sorry!" he added as the muscle along Jack's right shoulder suddenly twitched rather severely. "That's good, it should be doing that. Like I said, no nerve damage."

Even though Jack had ceased questioning his technique, the Doctor found himself still talking, realizing how much he had missed it, in only the short time they'd been separated. It seemed to give weight to the work he was doing as well, as though the words describing his efforts at healing were drawing Jack solidly back into his life. As though healing the physical damage was bringing solace to the emotional wounds as well.

"A quick pass over with the dermal regenerator, just to start the skin healing as well," the Doctor suited his actions to his words, "and we're done with that." His hand landed firmly on the back of Jack's head as his patient immediately started to try to get up, earning a startled squawk from Jack.

"Don't move your neck any more than necessary for a while. Be careful with it or you could cause more damage." He let go then, refraining from adding that that was precisely the reason he wasn't renewing the localized pain blockers. Pain could be a good thing, especially when it kept someone from carelessly undoing all his hard work.

"Was it really necessary to break my nose to tell me that?" Jack griped, sitting up very carefully, one hand cradling the offended feature.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the Doctor said, as sincerely as possible. "I can get the bone regenerator again—"

"No!" Jack insisted, rubbing the bridge gingerly, and then taking his hand away. "It's fine. Really," he groused.

"Good," the Doctor said, with an unabashed grin. "Now let's get that leg up."


	12. Chapter 12

A quick scan showed a rather severe sprain and some torn ligaments, but no bone damage — to Jack's vociferous relief. The Doctor regenerated enough tissue to repair most of the damage, although he insisted Jack stay off it for at least a day, and until he'd had a chance to look it over again.

Then, almost as one, they turned to Rose. A few quick passes with the regenerator and the smaller burns were only memories. The Doctor managed to visibly improve the main burn as well, although he reassured Jack it would only take some time and a few more treatments to heal it completely.

The swelling in her arm had largely subsided already, and Jack found himself leaning over to brush his lips against her forehead, relived when it felt significantly cooler to the touch. "I was so scared," he found himself saying without even thinking about it. The Doctor said nothing, just settled down on a stool and waited for him to continue.

"I mean the burns were bad, but I knew they were nothing I couldn't handle once we made it back here." He found himself reaching out and patting the wall of the TARDIS affectionately. "Once we made it home." He caught the Doctor's eye on that last word making sure the significance of it for him wasn't lost. The deepening of his gaze assured Jack that it wasn't.

"Rose wasn't doing so well by the time we made it back out here, the infection had already set in, but again, nothing the TARDIS couldn't handle, right?" The Doctor nodded slightly, silently, clearly realizing Jack needed to get this out.

"But then when we got here and she was just... gone," Jack took a deep breath. "I lost it. I mean, it really hadn't occurred to me what would happen to a TARDIS when her Time Lord died." Jack looked up, making it a question with his eyes.

The Doctor shrugged, giving a tight smile. "I don't know, Jack. Once she would have gone back to Gallifrey. But now...," he shrugged, acknowledging that he was in uncharted territory himself.

Jack nodded, "I figured she had left, maybe tried to go back." He took a deep breath. "But I hadn't planned for it," he said softly. "Suddenly I had nothing, no home, no place to go, and no way to treat Rose." He pulled himself up short with an effort. "I don't know how long I would have just sat there if she hadn't come back — if you hadn't come back," he admitted. "By the time you did, by the time I snapped out of it," the words were deliberately harsh, "Rose was already delirious from fever and I hadn't even noticed."

~~~~~~~~

Jack's eyes found the floor, unable to look at either of them anymore. When things were at their worst, when Rose needed him the most, he had frozen. Useless....

He started when the Doctor's shoes came into view; he hadn't even heard the man move. "Jack, you did what you could. Lay off."

Jack looked up, managing to meet the Doctor's eyes, but clearly unimpressed with his argument.

"You got Rose safely out of the prison, hid her all day, and got her all the way back to the TARDIS without being recaptured. You couldn't help that she wasn't here to take you in. What else could you have done?"

Jack's eyes fell again. "I was going to take Rose back into town, see if I could get some kind of medical care there—"

"At which point you would almost surely have been recaptured and the both of you killed," the Doctor pointed out.

"She was dying anyway," Jack found tears building behind his eyes at memory of the utter hopelessness that had gripped him. "There was nothing I could do. And to lose her again... to be stuck here without either of you...," he looked up again, right into those eyes with no guile, no pretense, no defenses left. "I didn't care anymore."

Jack wasn't sure if he was surprised or not when the Doctor just nodded. "Why do you think I left?" he answered in turn. "I spent the better part of the day drifting nowhere, drinking myself drunk, and trying to decide the best way to kill myself," he admitted with a deep sigh.

That definitely left Jack floored. He was staring at the Doctor like he'd suddenly grown an extra head, and he knew it, but couldn't bring himself to care. So thrown was he by the very thought, the immensity of that revelation, that once again, he questioned the most irrelevant part of all. "I thought you couldn't get drunk?"

The Doctor laughed softly. "No, I can. It just takes an awful lot of very, very strong liquor. And it doesn't last very long," he added as an afterthought. "Trouble is, I'm not that easy to kill." After a moment he laughed softly to himself. "That doesn't last very long either, come to think of it."

Jack barely heard the last comment, his head too full of more important thoughts to pay it any mind. The Doctor hadn't backed away from the subject, so Jack followed his thoughts, finding the words he wanted this time. "But surely you've had companions before." He frowned, the Doctor had said as much in passing, he was sure of it. "And they're... gone now," he offered, almost gingerly. "But you're still here."

The Doctor sighed, but did nothing more than pull over the stool once again so he could sit between the two beds, one hand resting in Rose's hair and the other resting solidly on the thigh of Jack's good leg where it hung off of the table.

"Jack," the Doctor started, and Jack almost held his breath. Personal confessions were not exactly the Doctor's style, and he hadn't honestly expected a straightforward answer to the question he hadn't quite asked.

"Yes, I've had companions before." The Doctor's eyes drifted shut, presumably remembering them, and Jack kicked down a tiny stab of jealousy. After all, he was hardly one to talk on the subject of past personal encounters. "Many of them. And I loved them all, in different ways."

When the Doctor opened his eyes again, Jack could once again see the world of sadness that lay just behind them. "But they all left eventually. Most of them were strays who managed eventually to find their way home, or lost souls who eventually found that missing piece of themselves in the eyes of a stranger from a different time or place.

"When I lost Gallifrey—" He paused, eyes wincing shut for just a moment again. "When I _destroyed_ Gallifrey," his voice was barely more than a whisper now, "I wasn't supposed to survive." He looked up at Jack, as though willing the significance of that to sink in. Jack just nodded, unsure of what he could possibly say.

But that seemed to be enough. "I still don't know what happened, but the TARDIS and I were thrown free at the last second." The Doctor shook his head slightly. "I was supposed to die with my people, Jack. And when I didn't... well, I went a little bit mad for a while."

~~~

It wasn't one of his fondest memories. In fact, it wasn't entirely one of his memories at all. Between the regeneration, the immensity of his shock and grief, and the gaping wound of emptiness in his mind, where there had always been a connection before — like it or not — he didn't actually remember all of that time. He was used to a certain disorientation and memory loss after a regeneration, but this had been so much more. Those memories had always returned before, eventually.

Some of these never had, and he'd never had the courage to chase them down or be anything but grateful for their omission.

Belatedly he realized that Jack was just sitting there silently, hanging on his every word. The Doctor sighed to himself. He wasn't one for the personal revelations, never had been. They left him too open, too vulnerable. Besides, a little distance, a little mystery, inspired respect, a little deference.

But that wasn't what he wanted with Jack and Rose, the distance of teacher to pupil, of guide to follower. Whether it would have happened without the loss of Gallifrey, he honestly didn't know. But, like Gallifrey's destruction, it had happened. What he wanted from them, was love, companionship. Equal partnership in this uncharted life they were now all living together.

"I didn't want to be the only survivor of a dead race, a dead world, Jack," he confessed, looking down at his hands, where they rested on all that really mattered to him any more. "But I didn't have the courage to kill myself either. That would have brought up... more complications."

Jack hadn't asked before and it looked like he was going to let it go again. Let him think it was a religious or cultural issue, and not just a matter of the sheer bloody impracticality of the damned thing. He wasn't ready to have that discussion with Jack or Rose yet. And he knew it was cowardly, but he hoped, with a little luck, that he'd never need to.

"So I did what I had always done: Traveled around, meddled in things, fought the bad guys, saved the innocents when I could." He sighed and looked up at Jack. "I just conveniently neglected the fact that I had no one to back me up or bail me out anymore. And if some of the risks I took were a little more extreme than I would once have taken...." He shrugged, feeling Jack's hand come to rest on his own, felt it squeezing his own gently in understanding. There were, after all, many different ways to commit suicide.

"And then I met Rose." The Doctor's gaze rested on her sleeping face, his hand still tangled in her hair. He laughed. "At first she was nothing special, just one more innocent about to get mowed down by something she had no way of even comprehending. But then I kept running into her, and she kept asking questions, intelligent questions. And then suddenly we were hunting down the Nestene Consciousness together — and it was _fun_ again."

He smoothed her hair out on the pillow absently, then traced his hand ever so lightly down the side of her face. "That would have been it, you know. I'd finally managed to push it too far, cut it too close. The Nestene Consciousness was about to kill me, and there wasn't a bloody thing I could do to stop it." He didn't really want to think what regeneration inside a vat of living liquid plastic would entail. He'd always rather preferred to think that that would have been the end of it — disintegrated well past the point of a simple regeneration. Not even a Time Lord could survive everything, after all.

It had been what he wanted.

"But then comes Rose, swinging in like the little ape she is." He smiled at the memory. "Taking out the Consciousness and saving my life in one amazingly brave move." He looked up at Jack, still sitting silent, as though afraid to break the spell.

"And I realized I was glad. That maybe I didn't really want to die just yet."

The Doctor sank back, resting against the wall behind him and gazed blankly at the ceiling. "I asked her twice, to come with me. Did she ever tell you that?" He shook his head mildly as if still wondering what he'd been thinking. "In nine hundred years, she's the only one I've ever asked twice.

"She turned me down the first time, to look after her mother and that hopeless boyfriend of hers. But I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to come. And I couldn't let her go. Not even then.

"And then, of course, I had her to think of, to protect. Even though I kept trying to run her off, like the self-destructive fool I was." The Doctor looked at Jack with a wry smile. "The first place I ever took her was to see the destruction of her own world. How's that for an introduction to life with me? Trial by fire, I guess, in more ways than one.

"But she stayed. Even though I'd taken her an incomprehensible number of years into her own future, introduced her to some of the more exotic and disturbing aliens around at the time, and then made her watch the lonely, unheralded death of her own planet — nearly getting us both killed in the process, I might add — she stayed." His eyes were back on Rose's face. He could watch it forever he thought sometimes, even in sleep like this, and never get bored. "She managed to accept it all." He laughed. "And then we went for chips!"

~~~~~~~~~

His smile was back, as quickly as it had disappeared before. Jack just sat, listening, fascinated by all the little details, some of which he'd heard before from Rose, but many of which were new. It felt like sitting down with a family photo album and reminiscing about years gone by.

"And then," the Doctor continued his voice deadly serious again, "before I knew it I wasn't just looking out for her, I was back to trying to keep my own sorry hide intact. Because it was fun. Because Rose somehow made everything worth caring about again."

Jack could see that, how Rose's infectious enthusiasm could have brought a slowly dying man — alien — whatever — back to life again. And she had the stubbornness to match the Doctor, to keep him on his toes, to provide a challenge for him. He wasn't entirely sure where that put him, however....

"So then it was Rose and I against the world, pausing only briefly for her to pick up another dumb little ape boyfriend, like taking in a manky puppy off the street that's going to chew your shoes and mess on your floor, but she thinks they're so damned cute, how can you refuse her?"

Scratch that, Jack was deciding he really wasn't sure he wanted to know anymore.

"Mickey the idiot, Adam the prat — I swear, for someone as bright as Rose is, she showed the most appalling taste in men!" The Doctor turned, and by the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth he caught more in Jack's expression than he'd been intending to show. "Then," the Doctor paused dramatically, "Then she shows up with _you_." He smiled, as Jack refrained from squirming with great effort.

"With you she'd managed to go from pretty idiot boys right on to devastatingly handsome criminal men." The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "I can't say I honestly thought it was an improvement at the time." He sighed, and looked... embarrassed?

"I admit, I was ready to let your infamous 'self-cleaning con' do just that, taking out both con and con artist at once. It seemed appropriate. You had come awfully close to destroying the entire human race. Who knew what kind of mess you'd make when you tried your next swindle?

"But Rose insisted, and... since when have I been able to deny her anything?" He laughed. "Nine hundred years of Time Lord being led around by the nose by a little nineteen-year-old ape. If the rest of them could see me now, they'd either injure themselves laughing or die a slow and dignified death of shame." He shook his head and almost reached for a drink that wasn't there, catching himself with a shake of his head.

Jack understood. This was the kind of conversation you usually had over a couple — or maybe more than a couple — strong drinks. He had a sneaking desire for one himself.

And he didn't have to ask who 'they' were.

"But you, Jack." He felt the Time Lord's gaze resting directly on him now and almost wanted to hide from it, from those eyes that saw too much and remembered everything. They hadn't exactly been introduced to him at his proudest moment.

And yet they'd taken him on, taken him in anyway.

"You," the Doctor continued, "were indeed so much bigger on the inside." He smiled. "You're so good at the con, so good at hiding, so good at playing the brainless pretty-boy. I admit, you had me fooled to start. I don't know how Rose saw through that so fast, but I don't want to imagine what my life would be today if she hadn't, if I'd left you behind to die for your mistake, thinking nothing of real value lost by it."

Jack sat there, having no idea what to say to that. "You two would have gotten on fine without me, you know," he offered finally, trying to brush off the intensity in those eyes.

To his relief and surprise, the Doctor agreed. "Probably, but only because we would never have known what we were missing. And," he paused fixing Jack's eyes with his own, "to answer the original question you didn't ask: No, I don't want to go on without you two. Loving you two is what made my life worth living again, when I'd lost everything, even myself. Without you... well, let's just say I wouldn't want to follow very long after."

"Tha's beautiful...."

The soft, drowsy voice was so unexpected that both men jumped, Jack slapping a hand over where the cut had pulled at the back of his neck and the Doctor nearly falling off his stool in surprise.


	13. Chapter 13

She couldn't help but laugh from behind her still-closed eyes. They sounded so much like guilty lovers caught out. But within moments they had recovered and she could feel them pressed tight up against her bedside, waves of concern positively radiating off of them.

"Rose?" That was Jack, and she reluctantly opened her drooping eyelids to see an almost comical worry on his face. She frowned at that, because she felt fine, just a little sleepy still. Even the pain in her arm had gone away.

"Jack, wha's wrong?" she asked, hearing herself slur the words and poking at her brain, trying to get it to kick entirely back into gear. It had just been so nice, drifting, listening to her boys talk, listening to the Doctor admit how much these two humans actually meant to him.

She tipped her head to the other side, where she could feel his hands cool against her wrist and forehead. She smiled then, looking up into that gawky looking face she loved so much. One she'd thought she'd never be able to see again. "Not dead." She smiled, not sure if she was reassuring herself or him, but either way watching his face light up into one of those face-splitting grins that couldn't help but make her laugh.

"No, Rose," he assured her and himself, unable to break the grin. "Not dead. None of us dead."

"Good," she pronounced. "Just about gotten you guys broken in." She couldn't hold back a small yawn. "Wouldn't want to have to start all over with some new blokes."

Jack was shaking with laughter as he swooped down to kiss her cheek, and she pouted. "Call that a proper kiss? I'm not contagious, am I, Doctor?" she asked, turning her head to the other side.

"Not in the least," the Doctor pronounced, planting a solid kiss square on her mouth. She closed her eyes, the lightness of the moment dispelled for an instant by the memory of what she'd almost lost. By the miracle of being able to do this again, his lips warming against hers. She started to move her arm, reaching up for his chest, needing to feel that singular double-heartbeat — that feel, that sound that was uniquely him.

But she broke off with a wince as the pain in her arm returned. Before she could react the Doctor was already pulling away, laying her arm back down on its pad of gauze. "Careful, love. It's not quite healed yet." She looked down herself and saw only the remnants of the major burn remaining; she winced at the sight of it, remembering....

"I'm sorry." She looked up and to her surprise there were tears in the Doctor's eyes as his fingers lightly traced the slightly itchy skin where the other wounds had been repaired. "I'm so sorry I couldn't stop them, couldn't protect you...."

Making what seemed like an extreme effort in her still slightly-drugged state, Rose managed to lift her other arm, rolling slightly to her side so that she could cradle his face, wiping the tears away with her thumb. "Shhh," she found herself saying, wishing desperately that she had both arms to hold him with. "It's all right. I'm all right now. See?"

Looking back over her shoulder, she caught Jack's eye. "Tell him," she insisted, a tiny rising note of desperation in her voice. "Tell him I'm fine, that they didn't do anything else!"

"I did, Rose," Jack assured her, resting one hip on the table behind her and leaning across, one hand on each of them. "But they made him listen." The flood of horror she felt wash through her must have shown on her face, but Jack finished nonetheless. "They gagged him, and tied him up where all he could hear was you screaming."

She was going to be sick, sick in a way she hadn't even been from receiving the burns in the first place. The look of guilt and pain on the Doctor's face alone was going to make her physically ill if she couldn't do something to stop it.

So she slapped him.

Dead silence fell in the room for a long, drawn-out moment, and it was anyone's guess as to who was the most surprised. But Rose quickly took control of the situation. "Listen to me, Doctor. I'm all right, see?" she fixed him with as determined a glare as she could manage until she saw him swallow and nod.

Then she turned on Jack, who fell into line even quicker.

Struggling to sit up on the slick surface with only one arm while still trying to shake off the effects of whatever the Doctor had knocked her out with was a problem. But suddenly she had Jack trying to help her and the Doctor, after another stern glare, giving up his attempt to keep her flat and doing the same.

That was better, she decided. It was much harder to be the object of weepy self-recriminations when you were up and able to act like you weren't at death's door. Which she was pretty bloody well sure she wasn't, at least not anymore. They always tended to cater to her, to circle around her, both of them. On occasion it made her want to scream with frustration and demand that they stop treating her like she was some fragile doll they might break.

But this time, she decided to use that hold she had on them for all it was worth. "Jack, sit, before you fall down," she ordered, managing to suppress her smile when he obeyed almost instantly. "You too," she ordered the Doctor, raising a pointed eyebrow when he made to protest, and watching in satisfaction as he settled down as well.

"Now I need to catch up here, all right?" The two men just looked at her, silently. "Good. First, me," she announced, turning to the Doctor. "What's with my arm?"

"It's going to be fine," he offered immediately, and she couldn't help wondering if he realized this was to reassure him, more than her. "A few more passes with the dermal regenerator over the next day or so and it will be right as rain." He smiled at her. "Not even a scar."

She smiled back, loving the slightly more relaxed look on his face. "Anything else wrong with me?"

He shook his head, reflexively checking her forehead with his wrist before consulting the little medical cuff on her wrist. "The fever's down, the infection's gone. You're a little dehydrated and could use some resting up—" he paused as he caught her look. "But you're fine. Really," he admitted, looking ever so slightly sheepish.

"Right then," she said. "So what's his damage?" she continued, hooking a thumb over toward Jack, who looked like he was about to protest, but thought better of it at the last minute. "Doctor?"

"Oh, right," the Doctor muttered. "That cut on his neck will need a few more days and a few more treatments to heal up completely. And he should stay off that ankle for the rest of the day... night... for a good ten hours or so," the Doctor amended. "Give the tissue repair time to set up properly."

Rose frowned, eyeing Jack. "I knew about his neck, but what happened to his ankle?"

"Hey, I'm right here!" Jack protested, as she turned to the Doctor for an answer. They both ignored him.

"Damned near broke it trying to get you down the hill outside in the dark and into the TARDIS before I took off again." At her surprised look, he shrugged. "No broken bones," — they both ignored Jack's muttered "Thank God!" — "Just a good deal of soft tissue damage. He'll be fine by tomorrow."

"Good," Rose concluded decisively, turning to face Jack. "My hero," she whispered as she moved in for a proper kiss from him. He was startled, but responded quickly.

As she pulled away, she kept her eyes on Jack. "So, what about him?" she asked, tilting her head back meaningfully at the Doctor.

"Oi! I can speak for myself—" One glare from Rose had him quiet. Well, perhaps not entirely quiet, but reduced to muttering in an undertone about being bossed about on his own bloody ship.

When she turned back to Jack, he was grinning. "Not a scratch on him, as far as I can tell."

"And just how closely did you look?"

"Rose!" The Doctor's voice was positively scandalized, and even Jack looked slightly surprised.

"What?" she insisted, refusing to blush. "I want to know!"

Jack, unsurprisingly, recovered first. "Sadly, we were too busy establishing everyone was alive and from the same timeline and not, you know, bleeding or dying. I didn't get much of a chance to go over him at all."

She grinned. Only Jack could make that into a salacious comment, and a salacious comment like that sound positively normal. "So." She turned back to the Doctor. "Anything wrong with you? Hangover? Any actual suicide attempts?"

His face darkened immediately. "You heard that."

"Yeah," she admitted, letting all pretense of this as a game fall. "I was just drifting there for quite a while." She smiled. "But I did hear some lovely things said about me."

"It's all true, you know."

"I know," she assured him, ducking in for another quick kiss from him.

"So," she announced after that, "if we're all so sodding healthy, what are we still doing in this place?" She gestured around the admittedly rather bleak-looking medical lab.

"You still need rest," the Doctor insisted.

"Yeah, but right now I can think of at least twenty better places in the TARDIS to rest," she countered.


	14. Chapter 14

In the end, the Doctor had no good counter for that argument, and Rose arbitrarily demanded a proper bed.

The Doctor headed for the control room to set a course for somewhere nice and safe and empty where they could drift. He had announced that he wasn't getting involved any further in the problems on Maxion 7. He'd build himself another screwdriver and the Scanta and the Humans would simply have to work it out on their own. At the bemused and utterly disbelieving looks on Jack's and Rose's faces, he had admitted that he might — given time — change his mind. But that for the moment, he was through with the place.

He got no argument from either of them on that plan.

However, when Jack — one arm thrown over a wooden crutch that looked like the Doctor might have lifted it right out of Dickens' time (and knowing him, he probably had) — tried to steer her towards her own bedroom, Rose was having none of it.

"Oh, no you don't." The one hand placed pointedly on her hip more than making up for the one she had to leave held awkwardly out at her side. "I've only just gotten you two back. I'm not sleeping alone tonight!"

No arguments over the need for rest, and the unlikelihood of getting any with the three of them all in the Doctor's huge bed together, would sway her.

Thus when the Doctor came back from the control room, he found his bed already occupied by fiat — Rose tucked in neatly at one side, and Jack starting to strip with one hip balanced against the other. Naturally, he began to raise the same objections that Jack had, only more vehemently.

Rose held up a hand and waited until he stopped. "I've just been over this with Jack, Doctor. You're right, I'm exhausted and still a little dizzy when I stand up." She waved off any comments he was trying to make about that revelation. "But I am _not_ sleeping without both of you in the bed with me tonight!" Her voice shifted, softening slightly, only some of it a deliberate ploy on her part. "I want to be able to wake up in the middle of the night and know you're both here, you're both safe. That _that_ was the nightmare and that it's all over now, all right?"

And it _was_ true. Rose didn't relish the idea of waking in the middle of the night and having to get up and make the rounds to reassure herself. "Besides," she said, smirking just a little. "_I'm_ supposed to be resting, Doctor's orders," she reminded them, primly — destroying the effect with her next line. "That doesn't mean you two can't entertain yourselves."

They both looked at her, even Jack, shocked at her knowing smirk. "What? You can't still think I'm Little Miss Innocent." She grinned shamelessly. "Not after all the trouble you two have gone to corrupt me so nicely."

The Doctor looked appalled, but Jack just snickered, earning himself a glare from the other man. "What?" Jack shot back with a shrug. "You know it's true."

"And I appreciate every second of effort you two put into it, believe me!" Rose insisted, watching until the Doctor's expression became a little less militant before delivering her _coup de grace_: "Besides," she said, the very voice of reason, "the Doctor never said I couldn't _watch._"

"_Rose!_"

"What?" she shot right back, sparing a grin for Jack who was sitting on the edge of the bed almost doubled over in laughter by now.

"You... but... you can't...," he sputtered helplessly.

"You know, you're doing a very good impression of a stuffy old man right now, Doc," Jack pointed out from where he was stripped down to his bare skin already. "Besides," he added, stretching shamelessly out on the bed, "I'm gonna start to think you don't want me."

The combination of the lascivious pose and the wounded puppy-dog eyes were simply too much for Rose, and she started laughing so hard she wasn't sure she'd be able to stop.

The Doctor froze for a moment, and Rose could almost see the warring instincts play out across his normally so controlled face. Mercifully, his hyperactive over-protective streak was drowned out by a combination of simple reason and sincere lust.

"I'll give you 'old man'," he growled at Jack, stripping his own clothes off in record time.

The Doctor flung himself enthusiastically on the bed, earning himself cheers and giggles from Rose, but he lowered himself slowly over Jack, ever mindful of his bandaged neck. The Doctor paused, hand cradling the gauze-covered wound for a moment, until Jack evidently felt the need to reassure him.

"It doesn't hurt." Jack's hand lifted to touch the Doctor's cheek softly. "And I'll be careful with it, I swear," Jack promised, the sincerity in his eyes matching that in the Doctor's.

The Doctor nodded, even though his hand lingered. Rose knew just what he was feeling. That had been the start, the closest call. The threats and fear and confusion and miscommunication that followed, somehow none of it could have quite the same visceral impact of that deadly cut, averted only by purest chance.

Then he flashed a grin at Jack. "I know you will. Why do you think you're staying on your back?" The Doctor asked, smothering any response with his mouth pressed firmly against Jack's.

Rose watched, fascinated, fighting the reflexive urge to turn away and give them privacy with the stronger urge to watch the two men she loved as they loved each other. She watched their mouths come together, tongues exploring each other gently, tentatively, as though each afraid the other would disappear into a dream if pushed too hard.

She felt her own pulse rise as she watched the soft hesitancy give way to need, to the stronger urge to prove the other's solidity, strength, presence — very much real and alive in this moment. Matching sighs greeted the Doctor's move to slide over to completely cover Jack's body with his own.

As the Doctor slid his tongue gently down the side of Jack's neck, lapping gently at the pulse beneath the skin, Jack's hands were running down the Doctor's back, fingers tracing each vertebra, each muscle, until they finally came to rest on the Doctor's arse. One firm squeeze brought a bucking groan from the Doctor that pushed them both together, before he started slowly working his way down Jack's chest, alternating soft kisses and gentle nips.

Rose could almost swear she could feel those lips against her skin, she knew them so well. It was the oddest sensation to feel the ghost-like echo of someone else's caresses on your untouched skin. Without realizing it, she had slid her own hand down her chest, rubbing gentle circles, imitating the Doctor's path.

Jack, his head lolling to the side with an expression of pure pleasure was the first to notice. He smirked, then nudged the Doctor over to look before she realized what she was doing and could stop.

"Looks like our Rose is feeling a little left out after all," Jack commented, laughing outright as a blush spread across her face and neck.

"This was her bright idea," the Doctor replied with an off-hand tone and a wicked look. "Besides," he pointed out casually, between resuming his kisses, "she and I already had a little moment to ourselves in that jail cell, before they split us up."

Rose's blush definitely deepened as Jack looked over at her in surprise. The Doctor's next words didn't help much either, "Of course, if the straw I was picking out of her lovely hair earlier is any indication, you and she found a pleasant way to pass the time in that stable as well."

At that, Rose thought Jack would have blushed himself if he were capable of it. As it was, he looked distinctly uncomfortable. Rose herself didn't exactly know what to say. Ever since they'd been together, they had _all_ been together. Always three together, at least as far as she knew. (She had her suspicions about what the guys might have gotten up to while they were in Ffokinem, while she was stuck by herself, burning for attention in the women's quarters, but she'd never asked them outright.)

Sensing the change in mood, the Doctor paused in his ministrations, crossing his arms over Jack's chest, resting his chin on his folded arms, and looking up at them both. "Perfectly normal response," he assured them, in a way that just made Rose feel somehow guiltier. "Responding to death, and near death, to loss and fear with the need to reaffirm life in the most biologically fundamental way possible?" He smiled at them. "Happens all the time in humans."

At that Rose raised an eyebrow at him, daring him to stick to that claim, until his smug little smile gave way. "Oh, all right, in all sorts of species," he conceded. "Rose and I thought we'd just seen you killed in front of us, and had no idea what was next. You and Rose thought I was dead, and were clinging to each other after each thinking the other lost."

"I'd want you to," he said, his voice dropping closer to a whisper and his gaze moving evenly back and forth between them. "The _last_ thing I'd want is for you two to be alone if you lost me."

At that, Rose couldn't restrain herself any further. She and Jack almost knocked heads in their attempt to wrap the Doctor tightly in their arms. For his part the Doctor was laughing. "I'm here, I'm here!" he insisted from where he found himself buried under the tangle of limbs. "I'm not going anywhere either, o.k.? ...so would it be all right if I breathed a bit here?"

Rose and Jack both relaxed their hold but didn't move away. The Doctor reached out to her face to wipe a tear away before Rose even realized she was crying. "There, there, love. It's fine, see? We're all here now."

She sniffled and nodded, trying to stop the tears before she really upset him. After a moment she was able to match his smile with a weak one of her own. "And besides," he continued, "it doesn't matter anyway, does it? Whether the three of us are all in one room or one bed or not, we're still _us_, right? And nothing's going to break that up." The Doctor looked up, checking each of their faces for confirmation.

And he found it. Rose was nodding so hard she felt like one of those bobble-dolls they handed out at the cheap take-away joints, unable to trust herself to speak, and trying to embrace them both as best she could with only one free arm. Her head was already against Jack's chest, and she could feel as well hear his vehement "Hell, yes!"

Rose just lay there for a moment, twisted like a rather uncomfortable pretzel and still loving every second of it. Every bit of contact with these two men, her lovers, her loves, her world.

"I have to say, though," Jack eventually broke the silence, "it looks like our Rosie's been getting more than her share of the pie around here lately."

She snorted in laughter at the same time she felt the blush in her cheeks rising again. "You have a point, Jack," she heard the Doctor agree. "Can't be going all greedy on us now, Rose," he chided as gentle hands pushed against her shoulders, one from each side, steering her back to her side of the bed. "Besides, you have to rest, remember? Doctor's orders."

Settling reluctantly over to her side, Rose watched as the two men gave her almost matching smirks... before turning back all their attention on each other. Continuing from where he'd left off, the Doctor made his way down Jack's chest and down the line of his stomach, planting little kisses and nips along the way.

Jack moaned, already hard, and instinctively his hips bucked up, trying to get friction against the Doctor's chest. With a chuckle, the Doctor slid lower, a hand placed firmly on each of Jack's hips, and took a minute to admire the man in front of him, in particular the very eager hardness right in front of his mouth.

He looked over at Rose, her eyes undoubtedly wide, and breathed across the sensitive flesh. Jack cursed under his breath and tried to buck, only the Doctor's hands holding him firmly in place. Then, with one last look to Rose, the Doctor stuck out his tongue and ran it up the hard, straining length.

Rose felt the slow burn of heat between her own thighs as she watched the Doctor mouthing Jack's shaft, tongue playing over it, mouth sliding to cover the tip, and then more. Jack's moans and little sounds of pleasure went straight to her own crotch, as she watched the Doctor slide down lower, gently taking the soft sac into his mouth as Jack hissed in pleasure.

Jack's near hand, being unable to reach any part of the Doctor at this point, somehow blindly found hers and clutched at it, the far hand fisting in the sheets as he groaned. Rose couldn't help the soft moan that escaped from her own throat at that. So often the two of them had seemed focused almost solely on her, on her pleasure. Now, to watch them enjoying only each other, yet linked to them with all her senses....

She could see the Doctor sliding his fingers lower still, teasing at Jack's opening, at the same time feeling the tremors of Jack's response through their linked grasp. Suddenly the link was gone as Jack let go to reach down and pull the Doctor back up to his mouth. Their lips worked against each other with bruising pressure, while Jack's hand slid down around the Doctor's flesh, exploring on his own.

"Do it," Jack hissed into the Doctor's ear, in a tone that left no room for doubt. Without bothering to argue, the Doctor leaned over the far side of the bed, fumbling for a moment before producing a tube labeled in some alien script Rose didn't recognize.

However its purpose, in this instance at least, was clear. Wrestling it open, the Doctor slicked up his fingers, at the same time going back to plundering Jack's mouth, their groins rubbing tightly together.

Rose didn't have to be able to see exactly what the Doctor was doing, she could hear it in Jack's gasping intake of breath. She suddenly remembered Jack doing this to her on a sunny beach in the middle of nowhere. The initial tension at the opening giving way to a slick sliding sensation she could feel right up her spine as his finger slipped inside.

Jack had been so very careful with her, taking such care to open her slowly, but there was none of that here. Here they were all hard need and desperate pressure. When Jack's hand flew out blindly again towards her she caught it, trembling herself with the shaking she could feel in his muscles, stifling a groan to match his as the Doctor clearly added more pressure, pushing deeper inside, making Jack's back arch with the pleasure of it.

"Now," Jack gasped out, pleading for more, and the Doctor responded, covering himself in the lubricant and moving up tight between Jack's legs. Rose watched — no question of blushing or looking away now — as the Doctor pressed against Jack, holding for a moment before slowly moving forward.

Rose felt as though she could feel every step herself, as the memory of the Doctor sliding deep into her, the memory of Jack so carefully entering her from behind, and the pressure of Jack's hand in hers now, telegraphing every twitch and shudder of his response all melded together in her head and in her body.

Slowly but steadily, the Doctor pushed all the way in, resting for a moment as he lay pressed completely into his lover's body. But another moment, a twitch of Jack's hips, and he was moving. They were moving. Rose watched, caught between awe and lust as the two men rocked against each other, feeling the bed shake with their increasing pace as their moans of pleasure echoed in her ears.

They were getting closer, both of them, she could tell, as much by the looks upon their faces as the movements of their bodies. She'd had each of these men, knew their rhythms, but to watch them play off each other was something entirely new, something primal that had her burning with need without even having been touched.

The Doctor slid one hand down to grasp Jack, rubbing him in time with his own strokes, clearly wanting to push Jack over the edge first. Panting, moaning, fist balling in the loose sheets on one side and tightening almost painfully around her own on the other, Jack arched up, his entire body going rigid as he cried out, gasping, his seed splattering in long arcs against both men's chests.

Another solid thrust and the Doctor followed him over the edge, body wracked with the familiar, almost painful-looking tension as he came, groaning and calling Jack's name, muscles straining to push himself as deeply as possible inside his lover's body.

At first Rose thought that the tremors in her own body were being transmitted straight through Jack's grip on her hand. She was shaking, panting softly before she realized she had actually come herself, just from watching the two men make love.

Collapsing against Jack, the Doctor lay there for a few moments, panting for breath, before carefully sliding himself out. Another foray beside the bed produced a cloth of some kind that managed to clean them up in moments. With a little concerted effort — pulling on her side, pushing from his — the Doctor and Rose managed to coerce an exhausted Jack more-or-less into the center of the bed.

Curling up against Jack's side, her upper leg tangled over his own, Rose leaned in to kiss him, then she leaned across his chest and shared a kiss with the Doctor, where he was lying on Jack's other side.

"That," Rose managed in a none-too-steady voice, "that was.... incredible."

She felt Jack's chest moving before she heard the chuckle. "Like to watch, now, do you Rosie?" he managed, his breathing starting to slow.

"Corrupted, utterly corrupted," was the Doctor's contribution, his own voice starting to return to normal. "Heaven help us all if her mother ever finds out."

That earned him a smack from Rose's good arm, and a groan of protest from Jack when it partially missed its target. "Oi! Don't go bringing my mother up in bed!"

The Doctor laughed at that, "Sorry, my mistake. Trust me, it won't ever happen again," he promised as his arms found hers across Jack's limp body, pulling all three of them closer still into a sweaty, messy, wonderful knot. A knot Rose hoped never to see unraveled again.

***************************

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> _Originally posted at [A Teaspoon And An Open Mind](http://www.whofic.com/viewuser.php?uid=1190) and before that in [my LiveJournal](http://diannelamerc.livejournal.com/187161.html)._


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